


The Wonder Amy Calculation

by April in Paris (April_in_Paris)



Series: The Wonder Amy Chronicles [4]
Category: Shamy - Fandom, The Big Bang Theory (TV)
Genre: Action, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Angst, Drama, F/M, Romance, Science, Secret Identity, Secrets, Superheroes, Superpowers, Tension, crossover?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-10-20
Packaged: 2020-10-12 15:00:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 48,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20566277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/April_in_Paris/pseuds/April%20in%20Paris
Summary: After Sheldon suffers a disappointment, Amy takes him to Stark Enterprises to cheer him up. However, not long after they return, Sheldon starts to exhibit strange symptoms. Can Dr. Fowler cure him with science before it's too late? Or will Wonder Amy have to take a calculated but costly risk?Posted simultaneously on fanfiction.net.





	1. Chapter 1

_He is only human._

He looked so small from the hilltop. Perspiration had plastered his dark hair to his head, a sure sign that he was not accustomed to this level of physical exertion. Certainly, the unusually sweltering temperatures in Los Angeles must have contributed to his lagging behind the rest of his team. His usual amount of sunscreen had apparently failed him in his sweaty state, for there was a faint pinkish cast to his pale face and his forearms peeking out from beneath his cloak. A breeze stirred, but it came from the desert in the east and not the ocean in the west and it only served to stir the same heat around. Wonder Amy brushed a loose curl from her face and watched her husband on the field below. She was familiar with his posture, one of defeat, and his flagging jog, one of exhaustion. She frowned.

The wind picked up and managed to ruffle his damp hair. He reached up to smooth it with his palm, an unthinking gesture. Even there, on the Quidditch pitch, he found a way to remain Sheldon Cooper. She saw his khaki pants and then his brown lace-up shoes under his black robe as he tripped and stumbled, dropping the quaffle from one hand and then almost dropping the broom between his knees as he attempted an uncoordinated effort to retrieve it from the grass. Amy's frown deepened. He had not looked so miserable when she left Penny and Bernadette behind, claiming she needed to find the restroom. But, of course, that had been at the very beginning of the game; it had taken Amy some time to lasso up the shoplifters in the historic section of Pasadena.

Sheldon was not supposed to be playing Quidditch today. He was the team's water boy, not an active player. But one of their chasers, someone from the geology department, was too ill to play. That left Amy husband's team one player short, an automatic forfeiture of the match. And his team was not about to lose the Griffith Park Intra-city Muggle Quidditch League championship game. It would have been noble of Sheldon to volunteer, but Amy suspected it was his competitive streak that had driven him to it.

Her eyes flicked to the scoreboard. Now, on the hottest day the city had known in years, they were about to lose anyway. Because they were research scientists, not athletes. Because he was a water boy, not a chaser.

Because he was only human.

A cheer went up from the gathered spectators as a man wearing a yellow tee shirt and shorts ran onto the field, a yellow tether with a rounded end hanging off his waist like a tail. The Golden Snitch. Amy sighed. Had it only been eighteen minutes since she left? Poor Sheldon, he already looked defeated. She could tell that for him, physically, the game had been lost. Her eyes found Howard and Leonard on the field; they didn't look much better. Only Raj, coming off the bench as the seeker, looked slightly less miserable.

Amy watched the action for two more minutes as Raj and his teammates were repeatedly unable to catch the speedy Snitch. The only positive was that he was too fast for their opponents, too. Or maybe it was a negative, when she realized how much longer the game would last and how much more exhausting it would become. When one of the opposing team's bludgers smacked Sheldon in the face, causing him to fall back on his hind end, she jumped into action.

The leap was easy and the hot wind lifted her as she glided over the crowd, the gold of her tiara reflecting the bright sun below. The Thyermistican alloy that comprised her breastplate shifted between red and gold, depending on the angle. Her royal blue star-spangled skirt fluttered and danced around her and her red knee-high boots pointed in flight.

"Look! It's a drone!" "It's a bird!" "No, it's Wonder Amy!" called the crowd in turns.

Ignoring them, she honed in on Sheldon's dropped broom and quaffle, picking them up from beside him as she landed. Amy straddled the first and threw the second through the elevated hoop at the opposite end of the field with such force it kept going, probably all the way to Santa Monica.

"Ten points for Perpetual Motion Squad!" boomed the voice on the public address speaker.

She crouched for power and then zoomed next to Leonard and snatched the bludger out of his arms, feeling the heft of the dodgeball as she threw it hard at the girl with red hair who had just attacked Sheldon. It landed against her shoulder with a satisfying rubbery _thump_ and sent her pinwheeling in surprise.

"Hey! I thought Wonder Amy was nonviolent!" she yelled.

With a smile, Amy squatted, coiling her power in her strong legs, and leapt off the ground once more to somersault with the broom and reached out to grab the snitch from the back of the yellow-clad player. Play on the field almost immediately stopped as members of both teams, along with the crowd, watched. She dropped back to the earth with a thump, dropping the broom from between her strong thighs, and marched toward her husband, still on the ground, propping himself up with his elbows. She put one hand on her hip to exaggerate her gait and she swung the yellow sock with a tennis ball hidden inside from her other hand, first twirling it one way and then the next.

Sheldon craned his neck up to look at her and put a hand up to shield his eyes from the reflection of the sun off her armor. She saw him gulp and she smiled as she held the snitch out above him. "Victory is yours," she said.

"Um, thank you," he croaked, and Amy realized how very dry his lips were. Of course, he was parched; there was no replacement for the water boy.

As he reached for the token of victory, she leaned closer, bringing her bosom near to his face. "I'll quench your thirst later," she deeply cooed.

Then she stood sharply, replaced her hands on her hips, and high stepped away from him, knowing how the act would cause her skirt to sway and her hair to bounce. Then, on the edge of the pitch, with the whole crowd watching, she stopped and looked over her shoulder at her husband, his mouth slightly agape as the snitch hung loosely from his hand, and she winked. Her task complete, she ran hard until she could take a galloping leap in the afternoon sun and seemed to fly away.

* * *

It was too hot for the cardigan, but Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler had it on anyway as she returned to the Quidditch field from the restroom. Penny and Bernadette grouped around the men on the edge of the field. The men were taking long drinks of water from bottles, their black cloaks unzipped to reveal sweat-soaked team shirts underneath. But that didn't stop their animated conversation, everyone appearing to be talking at once and using a lot of gestures.

She looked for Sheldon, expecting to see a grin and a wave, but he was deep in conversation with Leonard, his arms crossed and his lips pursed.

"Amy! There you are!" Penny called to her and she picked up the pace to join the group. "You won't believe what you missed!"

"What?" Amy asked as she bent over the stroller at Penny's side to check on Hector. Miraculously he was sound asleep, even in the heat.

"Wonder Amy was here! She grabbed the snitch and ended the game!" Bernadette explained as she bounced Hallie on her hip, her voice especially high pitched in time with the motion.

"What? Wonder Amy? Here?" Amy forced her eyes as open as wide as they could and made an O with her mouth. "I can't believe it! What happened?"

Raj explained, "She just flew in and handed the snitch to Sheldon. She made it look so easy."

"After she scored a goal and took out that nasty beater from the other team!" Leonard added.

"Did you see her on that broom?" Howard asked. "She was actually flying, like real Quidditch!"

"Wonder Amy can't fly," Sheldon interrupted. "She'd just able to maintain lift in the air longer than a human after she runs or jumps. Her muscles can store the extra energy required to achieve and maintain the increased height and velocity."

"It's more like advanced, super parkour," Amy added.

"How do you know that?" Leonard asked.

"Uh, Amy told me," Sheldon answered. "I mean, my Amy. Dr. Fowler. You know, she's a metahuman specialist."

"Well, whatever it is," Howard continued, "she can ride me like that - Oh! I mean, she can fly that broom like that for our team anytime." Bernadette gave a satisfied grunt as she removed her elbow from his side.

A loud cheer came from the other side of the field, and they all turned to look at the other team, clustered around a referee. They were shouting and pumping their fists in the air and giving each other high fives all while whooping aloud.

"What's going on?" Amy asked.

"They won," Leonard said as if it were obvious.

"What?" Amy asked. She turned to look at Sheldon and suddenly realized he didn't just look overheated and exhausted, but sullen. "But - but you said Wonder Amy gave you the snitch. So you won the game for your team, right? You had enough points to win the game after capturing the snitch, didn't you? You told me that, remember? At the beginning of the season, when you explained the rules with the whiteboard and everything?"

"Well, yeah," Raj answered for him, "except it's supposed to end after a player captures the snitch. Not a metahuman who swoops in to save the day."

"But . . ." Amy wrinkled her brow.

"You can't just have metahumans - or even regular humans - interfering in your game. It's illegal," Leonard continued.

"But . . ." This time, Amy whispered the word as the reality of her actions struck her. "But . . . superheroes swoop in all the time. It's what they do, show up and save the day."

"This isn't the battle for New York," Sheldon finally spoke, and his blue eyes seemed to stab her. "It's the Griffith Park Intra-city Muggle Quidditch League tournament. Emphasis on _muggle_."

Amy's heart plummeted like a stone. What a fool she'd been. Of course, she, a non-player and a metahuman one at that, couldn't just run - or, well, super parkour - onto the field and make a play and expect no one to notice or care. She'd been blinded by Sheldon and not in the usual sense. She'd been too busy feeling sorry for him and his weak humanity to think about the consequences of her rash actions.

She and Sheldon were supposed to be celebrating his victory, sharing knowing looks and double entendre smiles while they swapped witty banter. Maybe Sheldon would lift the sock-tennis-ball-snitch next to his face and wiggle his eyebrows as a reminder of how Wonder Amy made him eager to get home and get a nice, long drink of water.

"I can't believe you've been disqualified," Bernadette said. "I can't believe I hauled myself out here with a cranky toddler on the hottest afternoon in years for nothing."

"I can't believe Wonder Amy cares about Quidditch," Penny said and then she turned toward Amy. "And I can't believe you missed it again. Wonder Amy has shown up like three or four times to flirt with your husband and you're never around!"

"Wait, she's flirting with him?" Amy put her hands on her hips in mock irritation but then quickly removed them in case that seemed a little too familiar. She settled for crossing her arms instead. Wonder Amy flirting with Sheldon she could handle, and it distracted her from feeling guilty. "Well, it doesn't matter. She may have good taste, but that doesn't mean anything. She's a superhero and he's - only human."

But the last two words caught unexpected in her throat and she had to cough to cover up her discomfort. Sheldon handed her his water bottle without comment and she took it, grateful for and surprised by his intervention. As she drank, she wondered if he heard.

"Are you wearing lipstick, Amy?" Penny suddenly asked.

Amy reached up to touch her lips, still damp from Sheldon's water. She must have forgotten to remove it in her rush to get back here on time. "Um, my lips were so dry because, um, it's so hot and I should have been drinking more water, so I just threw this on."

"You should wear it more often; that shade of red suits you."

"Thanks." Amy turned to watch Sheldon rejoin his friends; the men had separated from them at the mention of lipstick. Their rapid conversation continued, each of their mouths downturned into frowns.

"And how does your hair look so good in this weather? It's so shiny and bouncy. Mine's just gone flat," Bernadette said, pointing to the ponytail she was wearing as if to prove that nothing else could be done with her locks.

Running her hand through the ends of her hair, hoping to brush out the last of Wonder Amy's curls, Amy said, "Well, it does that in the heat. Remember the photo from our wedding in Greece?" On one hand, she hoped they would change the subject soon; she wanted to draw as little attention to her absence as possible. But, on the other, these were the sort of deflections she was used to making. Not pretending she wasn't the cause of the disqualification.

"Oh, yeah," her friends said in unison.

"Wait," Bernadette said, "it's humidity that curls hair, not this dry heat."

"Um, um . . . I always thought it was just the heat for mine." Amy gave an exaggerated shrug.

"How are you feeling, by the way?" Penny leaned in closer. "Was it something you ate? Or cramps? You were in the bathroom for a long time."

"Um, yes, exactly. The curse. Curses, right?, here comes the curse again." Lies. Amy frowned but she knew her friends would interpret it as a perfectly understandable opinion on one's menses. Even her expression had to be a lie.

She glanced over at Sheldon, who was speaking to the referee now. Even from this distance, she could see his shocked expression and mannerisms, the way he re-told the Wonder Amy encounter seemingly without artifice. It suddenly occurred to her that if Sheldon knew she was going to interfere in the match, if it was believed that he had somehow orchestrated the whole thing, he might be disqualified from all the parks and rec activities for . . . life?

No matter how guilty she felt about her lies, she felt even worse for having asked him to live a dishonest life with her, for her. Well, at least this time he didn't have to lie; it had been a split second decision on her part and he was just as surprised by her appearance as everyone else. Amy was rapidly discovering it was far easier to lie for the greater good, for some sort of helpful necessity, than to cover up a folly or misstep. She fought the urge, far greater than when she could take credit for a good deed, to rush over and tell the truth. But Dr. Fowler hadn't ruined the game; Wonder Amy had. While Dr. Fowler was in the bathroom.

It wasn't the first time, nor would it be the last, that Amy felt very conflicted about all the lies she had to tell: sudden trips to the restroom, supposedly broken photocopiers, a baby that wasn't actually crying. Having friends and a social life had brought her so much joy but also so much contrivance. But she knew it was the price she had to pay to safeguard those very friends, to protect her child, to ensure that nothing would ever threaten the love of her life.

But Sheldon's performance was his superpower. More than once, she'd witnessed him struggle and fail horrifically to hide the deception of a far less consequential matter. Many times she'd seen him incapable of concealing his own opinion or emotions about trivial issues. But for her, with her, he was flawless. Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler, dowdy neurobiologist by day, and Wonder Amy, flirtatious superhero by night? Don't be ridiculous. Not that he'd ever even had to say that; so well entrenched was his subterfuge that no one ever got that far.

Some superheroes didn't hide themselves away at all, like Iron Man and Captain America. Hawkeye had found a way to balance his public power with his family. Even Spider-Man had found a solution for his upcoming wedding: Peter Parker and Mary Jane were having a public wedding and then Spider-Man and she were having a separate superhero reception. Amy envied them all at times. But, of course, they were also often targeted and that was exactly what Amy wanted to avoid.

So, instead, she stayed in the other camp of superheroes, like Batman, who hid behind their secret identities, who lied and dodged and showed up late in unexpected lipstick and curls. There were advantages like friends and a mostly peaceful home life, and, especially for Amy, the mental stimulation of a scientific career in which she genuinely found a reward just as great as catching shoplifters.

But there were moments like this when all her lies felt even worse than simple dishonesty. They felt like hubris. Maybe she'd become too accustomed to swooping in and saving the day. Maybe she'd become too attached to her superpowers to worry about the consequences, including what they did to Sheldon.

Just then, an announcement came that the TriWizard Cup Trophy was about to be presented to the winning team. Amy clapped politely with the rest of their friends, Sheldon standing away from her. She looked over him, his head hung in anger or shame or both.

* * *

Amy stopped as she rounded the corner from the bedroom. Sheldon's back was to her as he sat at his computer, and, for the second time in one day, it was a posture she knew well but wished she didn't. His shoulders sagged in frustration, his back curled as though he could hide in a shell from everything.

Apartment 3A had been entirely Sheldon's idea. He had lived in this apartment building as long as he'd worked at Caltech, first in 4A with Leonard, then in 4B when he swapped places in Leonard's life with Penny. Amy hadn't minded moving in with him, but after Hector arrived, that apartment was too small. Fortunately, 3A became available and Sheldon had jumped at the chance to recreate the perfect location for his spot. More often than she cared to admit, it gave Amy a sense of déjà vu, what with the furniture arranged exactly as it was just above them. But, after the major pieces had been settled, Sheldon had graciously allowed a blending of their tchotchkes and personalities.

Tonight, though, the sense of déjà vu was only disheartening. Sheldon still wasn't speaking to her. She'd tried to keep her conversation light-hearted on the drive home, tried to point out what a hot day it was and how it must be a relief that the game had been cut short, but that had quickly proven to be the wrong tactic. Sheldon ignored her and remained silent for the entire car ride, through the extra-long shower he took, and even her surprise meal of spaghetti with hotdogs and strawberry Quik hadn't caused him to utter so much as a thank you.

She looked down at Sheldon's Gryffindor robe in her arms. Not the dirty game robe he played in earlier; rather it was the special one she bought him as a gift to match her own. Once, the Pottermore quiz had sorted her into Hufflepuff, but she and Sheldon had just laughed before retaking it. Wonder Amy was many things, but a Hufflepuff was not one of them.

His posture wasn't instilling much faith in her that her plan would work. Now she felt silly wearing her Harry Potter robe like this. The combination of potential regret and polyester was making her almost as flushed as she'd been outside early.

"Oh, no," Sheldon groaned from his computer.

"What's wrong now?" Her discomfort was forgotten as she crossed the room.

"It's the website for the LA Department of Parks and Recreation. Not just pictures of the other team holding the trophy on the Quidditch page. But, right here -" his forefinger stabbed at the screen "- on the homepage is a statement about the interference of metahumans and the grounds for disqualification. 'Just a friendly reminder.' Phhlllpt."

Amy dropped his robe and slumped against the edge of his desk. "They're talking about me."

"Yes."

"Sheldon," she reached out to touch his arm, "I'm so sorry. I didn't even think about it, it was just so hot and I saw you out there playing and you looked so -" _pitiful_, she stopped herself from saying, just in time "- well, hot and tired, and I was just trying to help. I wanted you to win."

"I know. And now we'll be publicly shamed instead."

"This is all my fault. It was so stupid of me! I should have considered the rules."

"Yes, you should have." Sheldon swiveled in his chair to look at her and his face was thunderous. "Didn't I give you a whole presentation on them before the season even started?" Amy squeaked, not in protest, but in surprise. "But, then, you've always hated Quidditch, anyway. I'm surprised you didn't do it sooner, to cut our season short and save yourself the bother of going out to cheer us on."

"That's not fair!" Amy took a deep breath. "I don't hate Quidditch, I just don't understand it. Not - not the rules. I mean, the desire to pretend to fly when you can't."

"Of course you don't. You just fly all over the city doing whatever you want whenever you want."

Her mouth gaped open. "It's super parkour! And I'm fighting crime!" She reached up to rub her eyes behind her glasses. "I know you're upset; you have the right to be. I am sorry. I'm trying to apologize. I wish there was something I could do," Amy pleaded. "Should I have Wonder Amy show up in the cafeteria on Monday with an apology? I could take selfies. Pose for a team picture? Go to the parks and rec office and do something there? Convince them to do a rematch? It's all my fault and I should be the one to fix it."

"Technically it's only seventy percent your fault," Sheldon grumbled as he hit a few keystrokes and then closed his laptop.

"What?" Amy blinked. Was this the reprieve for which she'd been hoping? Maybe Sheldon just needed to vent.

"Ten percent of the blame rests with Bert."

"Bert? Bert from geology?"

Sheldon sighed. "It was only supposed to a hard science team -"

"But I think geog -" Amy stopped herself when Sheldon raised his eyebrow. "Never mind, go on."

"Anyway, Bert begged to be included, so we agreed. Well, I was outvoted. But then he sprained his ankle before the season ever started and that's how we got stuck with Mary Ellen."

"And she's the one that called in sick today."

"Resulting in one water boy who shall remain nameless being forced to play in the championship match. I should have known a specialist in shale would be flakey. So she gets twenty percent of the blame."

Amy shook her head. "Even if that were the case, I still feel like I should do something, make this up to you somehow." She stood up straight again and reached for his robe. She still wasn't convinced it was the right thing to do, but at least Sheldon was calmer now. "How about I give you a magical massage to soothe your tension and then, only if you want, we can make our own goblet of fire?"

"Not tonight. You can't make this right." Sheldon got up and stormed to the bedroom.

Amy braced herself for the thud of the door that came, and then held her breath, listening and hoping he didn't wake Hector. When no cries came from their son's room, she followed him and knocked softly on the door. "Sheldon?"

"I'm just silencing my phone. I don't want to have to listen to the notification sounds when all the texts undoubtedly come streaming in," his voice came through the door.

Not believing him in the least - yet another small lie he was incapable of telling - Amy replied, "Well, then, you won't mind me joining you if that's all you're doing." She entered without giving him a choice.

As suspected, he was curled up in the middle of their bed, hugging a pillow.

"I really am sorry." She sat down next to him. "I wish there was something I could do. Please know my heart was in the right place. I only wanted you to win."

"I know." He took a deep breath. "I know you think we would have lost without your interference. That's what I'm upset about."

"Um, you don't know that." She did, but she tried to hide it. There was no possible way they would have won without her interference.

"Yes, I do! Everyone does. Howard already pointed it out." His voice got much quieter and Amy had to lean closer to hear the next thing he said. "You're right. About pretending to fly, about pretending to be something I'm not. I joined the Quidditch team because sometimes I wish I were like you."

"Like me?" Amy's brow furrowed.

"Strong. Special. Not just a puny human. What do you see in me anyway? I couldn't even win a bowling match against Wil Wheaton."

"But didn't you win some bowling championship as a child? I'm sure your mother told me about it once."

"Please, Amy, that was the East Texas Christian Youth Group Holy Rollers team. The only thing punier than a regular human is a group of pre-teen humans who think God wants them to make a strike, not a spare. They've put all their faith in God, not in practice. MeeMaw took me to the bowling alley twice and bought me shoes so I didn't have to wear the communal ones, and that practically made me a professional by comparison. Not to mention I took a couple of practice throws while they huddled for the pre-game prayer."

"But you still won."

"It wasn't even a trophy, just a vinyl-covered Bible that said 'Stay out of Satan's Gutter' on the front."

There were so many antidotes about Sheldon's upbringing Amy found hard to imagine, let alone reply to. She tried a different tactic and reached over to brush his hair. "Since when have you been interested in your physical strength?"

He shrugged against the bed. "I just don't want Wonder Amy to be embarrassed by me, that's all."

"I'm not!" she protested. "You do know I only keep you a secret from Wonder Amy's public face for your protection, right?" Another shrug. "Your physical strength isn't what attracted me to you. And it's not what I fell in love with. And what I love about you only makes me proud, it doesn't embarrass me in the least."

"Is it my mind?" Sheldon sat up and faced her. "My intelligence is the best thing about me. It's my gift to the world."

"Well, yes, but your intelligence isn't what I meant."

"It's not?"

"No." She shook her head. "You are highly intelligent, and I love that about you. We have so much in common because of it, and it's wonderful to have someone of equal mind to discuss science with." She placed her palm over his heart. "But _this_ is what I fell in love with: your heart, your kindness. You helped me so much when we met, you helped me, little by little, see who I really was."

At first, Amy had considered accepting Sheldon's small acts of kindness as a sign of weakness; she was a warrior, the physically stronger of the two. But, one evening, as she sank, drowning, bruised and broken and burned, her arms having failed her as a plane full of passengers perished above her, she almost gave up. She closed her eyes and decided to let the sea take her for eternity. To let the sea take her back to Therymista.

But there, in the depths of the ocean, in the depths of pain, in the depths of failure, a single word had come to her like a beacon: Sheldon. She opened her eyes and pushed off the ocean floor. It had taken all of the might she had left, even from a well of strength deeper than known to any human or even Amazonian, to rise and find her way back to him. To ask for and accept his aid, his care, when she could not do it herself. It was not just the bath or the bandages or the way he sang to her that restored her to health. It was the weeks of gentle nursing: the books, the meals, working side by side, his holding of her secrets, the safety he offered her. He proved to her that strength was not coiled in only muscle or wielded by a sword. Truth came from a place her lasso could not encircle.

"But, Amy," Sheldon whispered, "you don't need me for that, not anymore. I am only human."

"Don't you see?" She curled her fingertips over his heart, bunching his tee shirt there. "It was you who loved and celebrated my human side. On Therymista, to my family, I will always be a princess and a goddess. Out there, I will always be a superhero. But with you I can be . . . just Amy. And my human side is only stronger for your humanity. Don't forget that. Your brain is magnificent and it makes you who you are, but your heart - your heart makes you mine."

As she continued, Amy leaned forward and kissed his forehead. "I'm sorry about the Quidditch match. I'm sorry I ever put you in a position in which you felt you had to prove something to me, physical or otherwise. I'm sorry if I ever, for one second, made you feel unworthy. Because you have more worth than anyone else I know, superhero or human. I love you, just the way you are. I don't want you to change, for any reason."

Sheldon nodded. "Thank you. Apology accepted. And I love you, too." After a moment, he licked his lips. "Are you naked under that robe?"

Amy smirked, the tension dissolving out of the room. "Would you like to find out?" And then she winked.

_To be continued . . ._

* * *

_ **Here we go again, on another Wonder Amy adventure! Thank you for joining me. Just a reminder that I am on Instagram with the handle aprilinparisfanfic, and I'll be posting story teasers, visual aids, and other content related to this story there should you wish to follow along.** _

_ **And thank you in advance for your reviews!** _


	2. Chapter 2

How quickly everyone forgot. Sheldon glanced around at all his friends eating and talking in Leonard and Penny's living room; none of them seemed to remember or care about the Quidditch disqualification. And it wasn't even a week old yet. Monday at work at been miserable, between the questions and the teasing about Wonder Amy and the goading by Kripke about the disqualification, but now everyone seemed to have moved on. Except for Sheldon, who couldn't stop thinking about it.

No doubt if he shared his continuing disappointment with any of his friends, they would scoff at him and possibly be offended. For their weeks had been filled with good news recently. Howard and Bernadette were expecting another child. Raj had a new job at the planetarium. Penny's latest advertising campaign proposal for a new medication had been selected by her employers. And Leonard had gotten word he would finally be a co-lead on a project.

Even Amy was distracted this week. Her expanded lab was almost complete, and she was busy flustering about details. Sheldon was thrilled for her, of course, that her last study on metahuman sexuality and procreation had been so ground-breaking and earned her so many accolades that Caltech had committed to becoming the preeminent location for independent metahuman scholarship and research. A new building was under construction, but, for now, Amy had just taken over a larger space in the existing neuroscience area. Even tonight, a Friday night, she was late, having texted him that she had to take a last-minute conference call and he should pick up Hector from daycare and proceed without her. He could be certain because her text hadn't been their agreed-upon code in which the female wrestling emoji meant "fighting crime, don't know when I'll be back, may be injured, take care of Hector, I love you."

So here he was, ignored in a crowded room filled with smiles, waiting on Amy. Waiting for Amy was something of his lot in life, but this evening, as he sat on his old sofa in 4A, he sighed. Waiting because his wife was secretly a superhero and was probably out saving the world was one thing; waiting as his wife dealt with her latest professional success while the most noteworthy thing to happen to him this week was a Harry Potter-themed failure was something else altogether.

Just when he was debating about going downstairs to his apartment because no one seemed interested in his worries anymore, the door opened and Amy came rushing in. "I'm so sorry I'm late; I'm sure Sheldon filled you in."

Greetings were exchanged, places on the sofa were shifted, food was handed over and at last Amy was next to him. She looked over at him and smiled and, not for the first time, Sheldon was struck by how strange life was, how his life was altered by another night in which the mysterious Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler sat on this exact sofa next to him. The night he learned her secret.

"All is well?" he asked.

"Better than well." She turned to face the whole group. "My call was with Stark Enterprises. I've been awarded a grant, and we can get an MRI machine for my lab. Finally!"

Everyone cheered and Sheldon reached over to pat her knee. An MRI machine had been one of Amy's greatest wishes for the new lab but funding for such an expensive piece was problematic. "It's so expensive," she started to explain for the group's benefit. "Not just the machine itself, but the salaries for the trained technicians to run it and there needs to be an adjunct radiologist, too. But Stark is giving us the equipment and the grant should cover five years for the necessary staff. Plus, they have a neuroradiologist that's going to help get everything set up and train me on it. I did some neuroradiology work for my degree, of course, but I need a significant refresher."

"That's great, Amy," Bernadette said. "Maybe I'll come use it to check the blood-brain barrier interactions of some of our mediations. Oh, wait, we really don't care about that."

Sheldon's eyebrows shot up.

"When do you get it?" Penny asked.

"That's the best part, it should be up and running in just a couple of weeks. Not for use on test subjects yet, because of all the other hoops we have to jump through, but it will be in place and functional then."

"What other hoops?" Raj asked.

"You wouldn't believe all the regulations. Mostly medical, like pharmacology for the contrast dye and the sedatives if needed. Oh, and we have to have a fully functioning ER-level crash cart. I have to learn how to use it and everything, in case I have to ever revive a subject. My whole staff does." She shifted to give Sheldon a soft frown. "I'm sorry, that means extra hours at the lab. It's going to be a crazy few weeks for us."

"We can handle it," Sheldon reassured her. "We've handled worse before. I'll be here."

More waiting on Amy. He was happy for her; it was obvious from the flush in her cheeks that this was exactly the type of excitement she wanted. And it wouldn't involve any supervillains, so he could be certain of her safety. But something like envy or disappointment plucked a string inside of him, and that never happened with supervillains.

"Oh, I do have one way to make it up to you!" she interrupted his thoughts. "I was going to tell you later, but it's not a secret. I've got a meeting on Monday at the Stark research lab, and they're going to give me a big behind-the-scenes tour first. I asked if you could come, and they said yes!"

Sheldon's eyebrows went up. "Dr. Fowler is getting a tour?" he tried to clarify without saying too much.

"Um, that's what she just said," Howard answered for her. "Sheldon meet Dr. Fowler. You've seen her naked, remember? I mean, who else would it be? Wonder Amy?"

Amy kept looking at Sheldon, neither one of them daring to change the expression on their faces. Everyone else chuckled at Howard's joke. After the laughter cleared, Amy asked Sheldon, "What do you say, aren't you excited?"

* * *

"You know, you don't have to go on the tour at Stark if you don't want to," Amy said, getting under the covers next to him.

Sheldon lowered his book. "Whatever gave you the impression I didn't want to?"

"I don't know. You just didn't seem as thrilled as I thought you would be."

"I was surprised, that's all. At first, I almost thought you meant Wonder Amy had the tour."

"Nope. Wonder Amy's been there before. This is a perk for renowned but very human metascientist Dr. Fowler and her equally impressive colleague, Dr. Cooper."

"Well, I am excited about the opportunity, so thank you."

"I thought it would cheer you up."

"Cheer me up?"

"You still seem sad. Ever since the Quidditch match." She curled in closer to him, and he moved his arm to encircle her. "I thought maybe this was just a little something I could do to make it up to you. I still feel guilty about the whole thing."

"Don't." Sheldon licked his lips. "It's not the Quidditch match, not really. I've just been feeling . . . stagnant, that's all."

"Stagnant?" Amy reached for his hand.

He shrugged. "Everyone else is having all these triumphs and breakthroughs and I'm just waiting for something to happen. It's as though I've become useless. I think Quidditch was just another example."

"Sheldon, you could never be useless. Look at everything you do for me. You're always there when I need you. Like this evening, picking up Hector and everything."

"He's my son, what else would I do?" He sighed. "It's not that, though. I'd do anything for you and Hector. I meant my career. I had this one exciting moment to save you from jail - which I'd do again - but then nothing. You said I'm your equally impressive colleague, but that's not true."

"Yes, it is!" Amy turned in his arm and looked at him with large eyes. "We wrote a much more substantive paper on metaradiation together after that. And you've been working other stuff."

"None of which is going anywhere. First, I disappointed you with my weak body and now I'm disappointing you with my mediocre brain."

"You are not disappointing to me!" Amy took a deep breath. "I wish I could help you, make you see your worth, but all I can do is tell you how much you mean to me. Maybe this tour will be good for you, it will expose you to new things, maybe give you a new idea. You know, Dr. Banner's lab is there now. I don't know if he'll be at work, but I'll see what I can find out. It might be good just to talk to another theoretical physicist."

Amy always looked beautiful at night, wearing the top of his pajamas as he wore the bottom with a white tee shirt. But it was the way she besought him, holding his hand like that with her eyes soft and worried, that touched Sheldon. He nodded and smiled softly at her, if for no other reason than he didn't want to give her anything else to worry about when she had such a full work schedule for the next several weeks. She needed to focus.

And she could be right. He had met Dr. Bruce Banner, perhaps better known as the Hulk, at a gala that he had been invited to not long after he and Amy had published their joint paper on metaradiation. Dr. Banner had been not just polite but an engaging conversationalist; he seemed genuinely interested in Sheldon's work. Touring his lab and speaking to him again might spark some new ideas.

"Alright. Surely there's at least one interesting thing that could come out of this visit." He leaned over and kissed her cheek.

* * *

Stark Enterprises Scientific Research Center rose high and gleaming above a hill in Hollywood. After passing through security and finding their way to visitor parking, Sheldon and Amy met their tour guide in the voluminous, sun-filled reception. A large glass and steel staircase curved along the edge of the room, three stories tall.

"Dr. Fowler, Dr. Cooper. It's so wonderful to meet you," the tour guide said. "My name is Ted and I'll be showing you around before your meeting."

"It's her meeting," Sheldon pointed out as Amy shook Ted's hand.

"Yes, yes, of course. But we'll make you comfortable here in reception while you waiting for her, Dr. Cooper. Shall we get started?"

"Where's Dr. Banner's lab?" Sheldon asked, following him down a hallway.

"Sheldon!" Amy hissed.

"No, it's okay. We get a lot of star-struck people here. People who never get to meet metahumans. It makes them do funny things." Then Ted said to Sheldon, "We'll pass by the physics department at the end of the tour."

"Pass by?" Sheldon grumbled to Amy. "And I'm not some star-struck country bumpkin on the five o'clock news."

"Well, you were speechless, as I recall," she leaned closer to whisper to him.

He snapped his head toward her and opened to his mouth to protest, but then shut it to avoid giving too much away. Amy chuckled as though that had somehow proved her point.

"First stop," Ted said, "IT and advanced computer sciences."

Through the large plate glass window was a room that looked like every IT office everywhere. A large bank of blinking servers lined the back of the room and the front was filled with standard cubicles.

"Hmph," Sheldon intoned. "I thought we'd get to see Falcon's suit."

Next on the tour came the robotics lab, then cryogenics, then the aquatic lab, then extraterrestrial ambulation; however, they just walked past each, viewing them through windows from the hallway.

"Lunar rovers fall under the engineering purview," Sheldon hissed. "Not physics."

"Yes, but it's interesting nonetheless," Amy offered. "One of your best friends is an engineer."

"So?"

"Can we pause just for a minute while I confer with my _colleague_?" Amy asked Ted, who nodded and then stepped discreetly away.

Amy grabbed his wrist - too tightly, Sheldon thought - and tugged him closer. "Be nice. This is a very important opportunity for my lab, and I don't want to appear ungrateful. You're here as my coworker, a scientist. Not a fanboy. I thought you agreed to be open to new ideas."

"I know. That's just it; I want to see the science. I thought we'd see the brains of the operation," Sheldon grumbled, but his heart twisted. Amy was correct. Wonder Amy didn't need this, but Dr. Fowler did. And if it was important to Dr. Fowler, it should be important to him. "I'm sorry. This is interesting. I just wanted to see the whiteboards, I guess."

"You know that experiential physics is just as important as theoretical physicists," Amy said. When Sheldon started to make a sound of disagreement, Amy put her hand up. "I'll ask if we can see inside the physics lab, not just pass by."

"Thank you."

Ted cleared his throat and keep walking, "And here we have -"

"Look, Amy! It's cats!" Sheldon ran up to the window and looked in awe at the three small rooms filled with toys and bowls of food and climbing trees. "I didn't know Stark was interested in pet rescue." He tapped against the glass and the gray cat inside walked closer. "I love cats. I once had a cat named Zazzy and he was -"

"I wouldn't do that, Dr. Cooper," Ted called.

"Why not - ACCCCCKKKKK!"

Sheldon leapt back when the cat's mouth opened wide and six large, pink tendrils shot out and smacked against the window, leaving a slobbering trail in their wake.

"It's a Flerken," Amy said, her voice filled with wonder.

"You knew about these things?" Sheldon asked, putting his hand against his chest to catch his breath.

"I'd heard of them, but I've never seen one." She looked toward Ted. "But I thought they only attacked those they felt threatened by."

Ted nodded. "Normally, yes, but they don't like people tapping on the glass. After the contractors finish the electromagnetics lab, they're going to remodel this lab. Enclosed private areas, more room to roam, even access to the outside with bird feeders on the other side of the enclosure. All safe and secure, of course."

"Electromagnetics lab?" Sheldon asked, perking up.

"Yes, in our physics department. I saved it for the end, to give us the most time, knowing it was your primary area of interest," Ted explained.

"See," Amy said softly.

They turned a corner in the hallway to see a construction zone through a glass window. "Watch your step. Soon, this will be the electromagnetics lab. We primarily plan on using this room to test Thor's abilities."

A cart stood in the hallway with what appeared to be several large sheets of metal on it. Sheldon reached out to pinch one and tried to lift it. Even though it was thin, Sheldon found that it was far too heavy to lift more an inch off the cart, and it fell back down with metallic _clang_. "Pure iron," he said. "For conduction. Its relative permeability is well over 5,000 volts."

"Wow," Amy whistled. Sheldon looked over at her, knowing what she was thinking. She had super strength but any electromagnetic force of that amount would kill her before she could stop it.

"Don't worry, there's a whole variety of insulating materials going in there, too. Porcelain, silicone, the works. We'll even have emergency tanks of sulfur hexafluoride."

"Is Dr. Banner in today?" Sheldon asked.

"I'm not sure," Ted said. "But his lab is just past the medical lab, where your meeting is, Dr. Fowler."

They turned a couple of corners, passing the sign for a medical conference room which Ted pointed out as the location of Amy's meeting, before they arrived at another heavy wooden door. "If you don't mind," Ted said, "I'll leave you here. You know where to go, Dr. Fowler. And for you, Dr. Cooper, after you've finished here, just follow the yellow line on the floor in the direction of the arrow; it will take you back to reception."

"Thank you for your help," Amy said and shook his hand before he turned and walked away from them. Then she looked back at Sheldon. "See, that wasn't so bad. And here you are, with free time in the physics department. What are you waiting for?"

Knock, knock, knock. "Dr. Banner."  
Knock, knock, knock. "Dr. Banner."  
Knock, knock, knock. "Dr. Banner."

Sheldon stood and waited but no noise came from the other side of the door. He lifted his arm to try again when Amy beat him to it, knocking on the door with enough force to shake on its hinges. "Dr. Banner. It's Dr. Sheldon Cooper," she called.

"Can I help you?" The door across the hallway had opened, and Sheldon and Amy turned in unison to see a middle-aged sandy blond-haired man in glasses standing there. "Are you looking for someone?"

Sheldon shook his head. "No, thank you. I guess Dr. Banner isn't in today. I was hoping to see his lab."

"Well, I'm not Dr. Banner - I'm generally much calmer and much less green." He stopped to chuckle, but it felt like a rehearsed chuckle for a rehearsed joke. When Sheldon and Amy didn't respond, he continued, "But I have a physics lab, too, if you want to see it. Dr. Greg Pemberton."

His extended hand looked pink and puffy, like something that would belong to a baby. Or perhaps an overly large Hobbit. Sheldon's lip curled. "I don't touch strangers. And what type of physics?"

"Wait, are you Dr. Sheldon Cooper?"

"Yes."

"I loved your work on the mutant monkeys."

Sheldon rolled his eyes. Not that he wasn't proud of his breakthrough and how it had led to all charges against Amy being dropped, but he wanted to be known for more than just his single courtroom appearance.

"Your paper on how radiation even at therapeutic levels can infuse metacells with transformative properties in certain primates was astonishingly well-researched. I never would have thought of that." He turned. "And you must be the co-author, Dr. Fowler."

"Yes. But it was actually Dr. Cooper's idea. He was the lead."

Amy squeezed his arm and Sheldon looked anew at the man in front of him. So maybe he looked less like a part of a superhero support team than Sheldon expected. But hadn't Sheldon himself, just over a week ago, bemoaned to Amy that he, too, wasn't as physically capable as a metahuman? Most important, this physicist hadn't been awed by Sheldon's show-stopping legal maneuvers; he'd been impressed by his more thoroughly researched paper on the topic.

"Thank you," Sheldon said.

"Have you considered working full-time on metaradiation?" Dr. Pemberton asked.

"I've been trying to convince him to do that for months," Amy answered for him.

"Come on in," Dr. Pemberton encouraged again, this time with a sweep of his hand. "Let me show you my lab."

"Go on, Sheldon," Amy said, glancing down at her watch. "I have my meeting with the neuroradiologist in five minutes. It's either this or wait for me in the lobby."

"Alright."

With a smile, Amy turned and left. Sheldon waited until she was out of sight and then he stepped through the door, squeezing past Dr. Pemberton and his eager smile. "Would you like some tea? I was just making some."

"Thank you," Sheldon replied, looking around the lab. It was not the tidy space he hoped for. How did one work like this? Sheldon was a firm believer that a disordered lab was the sign of a disordered mind.

"Here you go." But then, Dr. Pemberton had offered him a hot beverage. That was surely a good sign.

"You're an experimental physicist?" Sheldon asked, sipping his drink and studying the mirrors and lasers on the table. "This is an optics kit."

"Yeah, just one of the things I'm tinkering with at the moment."

Sheldon grunted softly at the word tinkering. Why would a scientist infantilize his work in such a way? Sheldon never tinkered. Of course, he also chose to never sully his hands; physics was at its purest and thus best when it was living in his mind. He could see everything as he contemplated it, something as small as subatomic particles or as large as a supernova could be easily visualized by his imagination. He reached out and touched the metal slide ruler track; distance was essential to determine the focal length. The inverse of the diopters equals one over the distance in meters. Such a simple equation and the equipment was only for the most basic of optics experiments. Where was the ground-breaking work worthy of Dr. Banner's colleague?

"Penny for your thoughts?" Dr. Pemberton said.

"I assure you, my thoughts are worth considerably more," Sheldon said, shaking himself out of his stupor as Dr. Pemberton laughed. It wasn't meant to be funny.

"Sorry. I've never had anyone visit my lab before and certainly no one of your caliber," Dr. Pemberton said. "Of course, I haven't been here at Stark for long."

"Where were you before?" Sheldon asked, deciding to be civil in case word got back to Amy.

"Fermi-Lab. You know, I was a theoretical physicist there so we have that in common."

"You were?" That made things more interesting. "You changed focus? Why?"

"Yeah. In the end, I had this idea, but I just couldn't get the math to work. Still can't even though I work on it from time to time. It's so frustrating, right? To think all the time? To have to constantly worry about coming up with new ideas, about making a name for yourself, to get published? And then you publish and, bam!, someone else publishes a few months later proving you wrong. But that's the easy part because you're already given them a head start on the math. You've done all the dirty work, thinking about it all, starting from scratch, and then it takes just one tiny change in a decimal point or something to take it all away. And you're stuck, back to square one."

Sheldon studied Dr. Pemberton. He'd oversimplified the process and clearly he lacked determination, but there was some truth to what he said. The pressure was exactly what Sheldon had been struggling with lately. He was not one for insecurity in his mental prowess or his career or much of anything, but he'd started to feel the weight of not being inventive enough lately.

"Here it is if you want to see it. A bunch of gibberish, really." Dr. Pemberton ruffled around on his desk and gave Sheldon a handful of heavily wrinkled papers. "Sorry, I tried to throw it away once."

The math made no sense. Sheldon lowered his eyebrows in concentration. Wow, this was atrocious. How did this guy ever get a job at Stark? But then something made Sheldon do a double-take. Not because it was correct but because the base form was familiar.

"Super asymmetry?" he asked. He didn't add that it was an idea he'd contemplated, too. Once. And that his theories, although still embryonic and flawed, were already far better than the mess on these sheets of paper. It was almost as though Dr. Pemberton had thought of a catchy word by sheer accident and decided to make up something to match, but, in reality, he didn't understand it at all.

Dr. Pemberton shook his head. "It doesn't exist. That's why I threw it away. I decided to stop chasing things that don't exist, that can't be real. I came here to do real-world physics. Practical stuff. Dr. Banner gives me the ideas, the math, the parameters, and I test it. I just tell him if it worked or not and try not to think about it too much. That's it."

Sheldon looked down at the numbers again. He remembered the moment he put his notes on super asymmetry away. The moment he gave up. "Do you really find that satisfying?"

The other scientist made a noncommittal noise. "It pays the bills. And it's a lot less frustrating than banging your head against the wall every day. Am I right?" He slapped Sheldon's bicep and Sheldon flinched, pulling away from Dr. Pemberton in surprise.

"Oh, sorry." Dr. Pemberton lifted his hand and smiled. "Sometimes I just forget how thick and meaty I am. I played football at Notre Dame."

"Football? I used to help my father plan plays for his football team."

Somehow that comment reminded Dr. Pemberton of another experiment, and he waved Sheldon over to it. Sheldon put down the messy papers and followed. And then he followed Dr. Pemberton to the next one. But he wasn't listening anymore.

* * *

"Did you enjoy your time with Dr. Pemberton?" Amy asked when they were alone in the car again.

"I'm not sure," Sheldon confessed.

"What do you mean? No inspiration? Not a single idea?"

"Definitely not. He's disorganized. And he doesn't seem smart enough to work for someone like Dr. Banner. His thoughts aren't linear."

"Sheldon, not everyone is as smart as you," Amy admonished.

"But he's not committed. He gives up too easily. His lab is littered with half-finished experiments and equations," Sheldon explained. "I could never be like that. You have to keep working, you can't just quit. Do you know the term break-through didn't initially mean an instantaneous epiphany? It means the moment when soldiers finally made it through a barrier after chipping away at it for a long period of time."

"I don't know," Amy said softly. "I think it sounds like you learned something."

Sheldon absorbed this without comment. Instead, he reached up to rub his sore arm and then turned his face to look out the window.

_To be continued . . ._

* * *

_ **Thank you in advance for your reviews!** _


	3. Chapter 3

"Sheldon, what _are_ you doing?"

He put down his arm and looked over at Amy, sitting next to him on the sofa. "What do you mean?"

"You've been scratching your head all evening. I can't take it anymore." Her brows had dipped in that way she had that made him unsure whether she was concerned or angry.

"It itches," he explained, although it was the first time he'd thought about how much he'd been digging his fingernails into his scalp to find relief. "Do you think there was something at Stark I'm allergic to?"

"Did you go into the botany lab after I left?" Amy asked.

"No."

"Does it itch anywhere else?"

Running a mental analysis of his skin, Sheldon paused and then shook his head. "No."

"Do your lips or tongue feel funny or full?"

Sheldon smacked his mouth. "No."

"Any trouble breathing?"

He gave an exaggerated inhale and exhale. "No."

"Any rash or hives?"

He lifted his shirt to inspect his soft white belly, hoping that Amy didn't think it looked as soft as he did. "No." He glanced up. "Should we do a strip search?"

"If this is all foreplay, this is your weirdest idea yet."

"It's not."

Amy sighed. "I didn't think so."

"Maybe an insect bit me while I was there? Oh no!" The horror of the idea struck him and he could almost feel his pupils dilate. Wait! Was that another symptom? "I can't turn into Spider-Man, I'm afraid of heights!" He flipped over his hands, studying the inside of his wrists, running his fingertips along the blue veins showing there. But nothing seemed amiss.

Amy rolled her eyes. "You're more likely to get lice from the daycare than be bitten by a mutant spider at Stark, Sheldon. You saw all the safety protocols. And I know you well enough to know there was no way you went into the insect lab."

"Lice? Do you think it's lice?" He got up and ran to the kitchen, pulling out a drawer, and digging frantically through it while he reached up to scratch his head again.

"What are you doing now?" Amy called.

"Chopsticks." He came running back to the sofa, carrying them out in front of him like an offering. "Here."

At first, Amy just stared at the chopsticks, but then she took them with a deeply wrinkled brow. Sheldon sat on the floor in front of her, crossing his longs legs under him. "What am I supposed to do with these?" Amy asked.

"Use them to search through my hair for lice. Like in elementary school."

"Um, I didn't go to elementary school." Sheldon didn't move and he had no plans to, not until he'd been thoroughly inspected. Finally, he heard her sigh behind him and she leaned forward with the chopsticks, gently running them through his hair. "Like this?"

"Yes." He could feel his hair lift and move, and that, combined with the gentle pressure and whirls of the chopsticks, caused his shoulders to relax. "I forgot how good this feels. I'll do your hair afterward and we'll need to do Hector's."

"This is silly. Hector hardly has any hair. And I was only making a point about the extremely low chances of you contracting something at Stark, not seriously suggesting you have lice. I've seen you clean your hair. There is no way a parasite is surviving that."

"Do you know that lice prefer clean hair? It's easier to cling to and attach their nits."

"Sheldon, there aren't any lice or their eggs in your hair. It's probably just an allergy; maybe the recent heatwave stirred something up. You need to stop scratching, your scalp is already red and irritated. Take a pill instead."

The soothing feeling on his head stopped, and Sheldon twisted to look up and back at Amy. She looked down at him and held the chopsticks up. "I assume we're throwing these away."

"Yes. Thank you for looking."

"You're welcome."

Sheldon unfolded his legs and took the chopsticks to the trashcan beside the refrigerator before he prepared a mug of tea for each of them. Amy sat silently while he did that and looked at him expectantly when he handed her the tea.

"Amy," he said, sitting down next to her, "I owe you an apology. I've been acting . . ."

"Childish?"

"I was going to say dissatisfied. Way to go for the sucker punch." He shook his head. "Whatever you call it, I acted inappropriately after the Quidditch match and even at Stark yesterday. I was pouting. I know you were only trying to cheer me up with both of those things."

"Apology accepted. But what matters is whether you're feeling better."

He nodded. "I think so. I got out a lot of my discarded notes and ideas today and went through them. I think there might be a couple to work with and refine. Like super asymmetry. I just need to apply myself. I don't want to turn into Dr. Pemberton; I don't want to be a quitter."

"Good, because the Sheldon I know isn't a quitter. Remember how hard you fought for me, how much time and effort you put into that? I'm not talking about that day at court, even, I'm talking about how you helped me see who I really am. I was lost and you were the one who found me. And that wasn't easy."

"Maybe . . ." He took a deep breath and looked down at his tea. "I guess I was feeling sorry for myself, and then I wondered why you'd ever want to be with someone as pitiful as me."

"Because I love you." Amy put her hand over his. "And you're not pitiful. You are just the type of silent strength I need, the calm in my storm. I know I have you to come home to and I can count on you when I need you. I don't know what I'd do if you weren't . . . you. But I know it's hard when you can't tell your friends that your wife is a superhero, when you have to hide our victories."

"It is," he agreed.

"A lot has changed in the past two years: you met me, you wooed me, we got married, we had a baby, we moved downstairs to this apartment."

"You forgot I almost got ran over by a train at the hands of robotic nanobyte Borg king."

"There was that," Amy said with a chuckle. "And you helped to stop him. But my point is that things are bound to seem boring after all that. Life has its ups and downs. Don't forget my career was floundering until we published our metaradiation paper together."

"I would say now it's your turn to shine, but you're Wonder Amy so you're always shiny."

"That's just the reflection of the sun off my armor," Amy pointed out.

"Not to me, it's not." Sheldon leaned forward and kissed her cheek. "Thank you. I promise I'll try to be the calm, boring Sheldon you need for the next few weeks so you have one less thing to worry about. You concentrate on your new MRI lab, and I'll concentrate on everything else. Like finding a new idea."

* * *

"Sheldon? Do you have any idea what time it is?"

He turned behind his whiteboard to see Amy standing in the dark hallway in his pajama shirt, her hair tossed. Didn't she just arrive home, flushed from another victory as Wonder Amy, her hair curled and her skirt swaying? "I guess not."

"It's almost five. I even slept in a little because I got back so late last night." Coming to stand next to him, she placed a hand on his back. "Are you even going to try and get any sleep or just go into work exhausted?"

He rolled his shoulders as a test. "Actually, I don't feel tired. I was working on this one idea I had. I made some progress, I think."

Amy smiled at him. "I'm glad you feel reinvigorated for your work. I guess one night without a full eight hours of sleep won't hurt you. But why don't you go to bed now and try to get a few, at least? I'll take Hector into daycare and you can just come in later when you're ready."

"You're probably right." He capped the marker and leaned over to kiss her cheek. "How can I be the steady husband you need if I'm not sleeping properly?"

After he'd set his alarm to ten and gotten into bed, Sheldon expected to lie there wide awake. He still didn't feel tired. Amy was right; not just about the sleep, but that he felt invigorated. He couldn't remember the last time theoretical physics felt so alive. If he hadn't known better, he would have said his brain physically tingled with pent-up possibilities.

He rolled over on his side, closed his eyes, firmly told himself that he needed to sleep, and his body surprised him by promptly doing just that.

* * *

"Remind me again why we parked so far away," Sheldon grumbled.

"I told you, the parking lot closest to the movie theater is being resurfaced," Howard explained.

"No, I got that the first time you said it. But what about that lot on Union Street?"

"It's not any closer," Raj said.

"Yes, it is. It's point-one-five miles closer. There are two-thousand-seventy-three steps in a mile; if we parked there, I would have to walk three-hundred-eleven fewer steps."

"You know how many steps are in a mile?" Howard asked.

"Oh, no," Sheldon started and Howard smiled, "because it's not the same for everyone. It depends on one's height as that has a direct correlation to the length of one's stride." Howard's smile dropped. "I walk two-thousand-seventy-three steps per a mile, but you with your stubby legs, for example, would take even more. Which means the more preferable parking lot would have saved you even more steps, too."

Leonard snorted. "What did you do, count them just to complain?"

"It's not necessary. If you know the distance of your stride, you can quite easily calculate -"

Without warning, an extremely loud screech of car tires tore through the air, and Sheldon bent forward to push all of his friends further down the sidewalk. They lurched and stumbled forward. Before they could even question him, a white sports car slammed into the fire hydrant they'd just passed with a horrible crunch. The bird that had been sitting on top of it squawked and flew away with a rapid flutter.

"What just happened?" Raj yelled, his eyes wide.

"I'm calling 911," Leonard said, already dialing his phone. "Somebody go see if that driver is okay."

Howard and Raj ran around to the driver's door and knocked on the window. The driver was understandably dazed but he rolled it down and claimed to be unharmed. Before long, a police car arrived and the officers took over the situation. The movie forgotten, all four of them watched the drama unfold as an ambulance arrived.

"Sheldon, how did you see that car coming behind us?" Leonard asked.

"Yeah, I never thought you'd be the one to save our lives. I always had my money on the other way around," Howard said.

"I didn't save your lives. We were too far beyond the fire hydrant to be hit," Sheldon explained.

His three friends studied the scene around them and made mumbled noises of agreement. Raj asked, "Wait, if you didn't push us away to save our lives, what were you doing?"

"Isn't it obvious? I heard the screeching of the tires and was immediately able to pinpoint the trajectory of the approaching car. In addition, I crossed-referenced ambient sounds to determine the speed of its approach using the Doppler Effect. I knew it couldn't reach us, but I realized there was a ninety-two percent chance of it hitting the fire hydrant thus startling the pigeon that was standing there. Even with an eight percent chance that it might hit the light pole instead, that still resulted in an eighty-two percent chance the bird would be frightened. Regardless, there was a seventy-six percent chance the startled pigeon would fly south because that was the direction it was facing when walked past it. A startled bird has a forty-five percent chance of dropping feces as a fear response. If the pigeon flew south and defecated, the resulting droppings had a thirty-two percent chance of hitting one of us based our speed and location. Trust me, no one wants that. One time a pigeon defecated on me, and Amy had to clean it off my tee shirt with Purell and dandelion leaves just to make it home." He hung his head at the memory. "Rest in peace, RadioShack tee shirt."

Three faces stared at him and each one of them looked more confused than the last. Raj and Howard had even let their jaws hang open, a look that only emphasized their lack of comprehension. Why were they looking at him like that? There was no doubt that he explained the situation clearly.

Leonard's eyebrows furrowed into a single brow. "Are you saying you shoved us, not because you were worried we were going to die, but because you didn't want us to get pooed on?"

"Precisely. Speaking of precisely," Sheldon walked back toward the accident and pointed down at the sidewalk, "here's the fresh feces. Right where we were walking. See? You're welcome."

"But if you knew the car was going to crash, why didn't you stop it instead?" Howard asked.

Sheldon pulled his head back sharply. "Stop it? How? I'm not a superhero. The only action I could pursue with my limited bodily strength was to protect your clothing from bird droppings. It was probably surprise that made you move more than my strength. Again, you're welcome."

"Let's back up. You did all that math in your head in a split second?" Raj asked.

"Yes. Traffic accident reconstruction is basic physics."

"But you said you did all the math before, not as a reconstruction," Leonard pointed out.

As he nodded, Sheldon replied, "I could see it all in my mind, the car going through the intersection, the fire hydrant, the bird, everything."

"Well, that's creepy," Howard said. "I mean, even creepier than you normally are."

Before he could reply, a police officer approached them to get their statements. Sheldon listened as his friends gave a much more simplified version of events to the man, leaving out all mentions of pigeons and percentages. According to their reports, they heard a car squeal loudly, they jumped away in surprise, and the car crashed behind them. That's it.

"No, sir, we didn't see the car approach or go through the intersection. We were walking in the opposite direction," Leonard said. "Unless Sheldon saw something."

Everyone turned to look at him, but Sheldon just shook his head. "No, I was facing the opposite direction, too."

And he had been. One second he was facing west, walking just behind his friends, complaining about the distance, and, the very next, he heard the tires and saw the resulting consequences in his head, complete with lines and arrows and equations drawn over the area as though it was an accident reconstruction diagram. Time seemed to slow, everything became a crawl. But all he had done was blink, take a breath, and push against his friend's backs.

Their statements must have been complete because Leonard tugged on his shirt. "Come on, Rainman, let's go. We'll probably miss all the trailers now anyway."

Sheldon let the Rainman comment pass without discussion, and he walked the rest of the way in silence, replaying everything that happened during the blink and the breath over and over again.

* * *

"Amy! Look at this!" Sheldon yelled the words as he ran into her lab.

Amy jumped and then grabbed her chest. "You can't just come running in here like that with no warning. You almost scared me to death!"

"Knowing what your primary hobby is, I find it highly unlikely that my excitement is going to lead to your demise."

"Sheldon!" Amy hissed while sending him a dirty look.

"What? I instantaneously ascertained that your lab is otherwise empty and no one would overhear. In addition, I simultaneously decided to make an oblique reference by calling it a hobby, not a social imperative based upon your superhuman strength and a moral imperative based on your wisdom and pacifism. That way, in case a stray person walked by before the door fully closed - which I calculated there was less than a one percent chance of - they would have no idea what we were discussing."

"Um, okay." Her eyebrows dipped. "How long are you going to keep up this new habit of giving a rundown of every single decision you make?"

"I hadn't considered it. I'll work on that next. But first, look at this."

"Okay, fine. Let's see what's got you so excited today, shall we?"

"Remember my old abandoned work I got back out?" He waited for her to nod. "Here."

He watched her study the notebook he handed her, her eyes weaving back and forth over his equations and diagrams, flipping the page when necessary. "I think this might work," she said, looking up at him.

"Might? Did you see that last bit? It's a certainty."

She smiled as she gave the notebook back to him. "I'm sure you're right. I'm sorry, I'm just really overwhelmed with other stuff right now. Maybe after my test, I can sit down with you and concentrate while you explain it to me."

"Test?" Sheldon asked, approaching her lab table, looking down over what she had spread on top of it.

"I'm taking the Red Cross Advanced Life Support test next week, remember? It's a written and a practical. They're installing the MRI machine tomorrow; I have to get ready."

Sheldon picked up a closed textbook. "_Emergency Department Resuscitation of the Critically Ill_," he read and then looked at her. "You have to know all this? For an MRI?"

"Well, not all of it. But the neuroradiologist let me borrow it from her. I thought it might help me retain all the steps better if I understood the science behind them. That's why I've been so absent-minded lately; I've been studying too much, probably. I've not been the most attentive partner."

Sheldon frowned. Had Amy been absent-minded lately? He tried to run down everything that had occurred in the past two weeks. There were vague wisps of things like taking care of his son or kissing Amy goodbye or eating dinner together, but the memories felt distant. But the science, all the math he'd been doing, that felt real. Alive.

"Maybe we've both just been extremely focused on our work lately," he said, trying to push away the feeling that he'd been the inattentive half of this partnership. "Not absent-minded."

"Maybe." Amy took a deep breath and reached up behind her glasses to rub her eyes. "I could use a break, though. It's good you came over to distract me."

He felt like it was the first time he'd looked at her recently. Did Amy look tired? Despite her super strength and her demigoddess status, Sheldon knew Amy was just as capable of being overwhelmed as a mere human. He leaned down to kiss her hair. "I'm glad I came, too."

Leaning into him, Amy wrapped her arms about his waist. "You feel good."

"I always do," Sheldon mumbled with a smile and patted her shoulder. Then, still hovering, he took a deep breath of her. It was the scent he knew well, something spicy and powerful, but it seemed to fill his senses entirely. More than usual, even setting off an aura of red in his peripheral vision. "Amy, did you just go . . . fix the photocopier?"

"No. I've been studying all morning. Why?" She pulled away to look up at him.

"It - you just seemed . . ." He leaned over further to capture her lips, holding himself with his palm on her lab table. Amy gave a surprised sound at first, but she melted under him. He encouraged her to open her mouth with his tongue, and the taste of her sent a jolt straight to his neither regions. How long had it been? Had they both been so focused on work that they'd forgotten this?

"Mmmm, that was nice," she said, standing and pushing him away, "but we're at work."

"It's a good thing the door shut behind me."

Amy chuckled and looked down. "I have to study."

"You can practice resuscitating me. You know, mouth to mouth," he offered, placing one hand on her shoulder and his other palm on her stomach, feeling the hard chill of her armor beneath her blouse.

She looked up, her eyes sharp. "Don't ever joke about that."

Sheldon shrugged and pressed his lips close to her ear and let his fingers run along the edge of her waistband. "We'll go to the back room. No one will think anything of it; it will just be like all those times you fix the photocopier," he whispered seductively.

"Ohhh," Amy moaned as he captured her earlobe with his teeth. "Coincidentally, they just installed a photocopier back there yesterday."

"Good. All the better to practice your alibi with." His hand trailed down and unbuttoned her skirt. Amy pawed at his tee shirt. "We'll set it to run and the noise will drown out your screams."

"My screams? Who said I'll be screaming?"

"Is that yes?"

Amy paused and then gradually her eyes took on that sparkle he knew well. "Why don't you find out?"

His hand slipped beneath her skirt and her panties and found just how ready she was to scream for him. "Oh, Sheldon!"

"Don't you feel yourself relaxing already?" he whispered, thick and husky in her ear. Amy clung to him as her breath sharpened and contracted.

"Don't - stop - please." Each word was punctuated with a shiver as he toyed with her, giving her a touch of pleasure and then pulling way.

"How many?" he asked. "A hundred copies?" He plunged his fingers into her and she groaned into his chest. "A thousand?" She couldn't even answer anymore, her mouth open and heaving into his chest, her eyes closed and her neck arched backward. Almost unable to control herself, her super strength pulled him down and it was all he could do to keep them both upright. "Sort?" A moan. He flicked and circled his thumb right where he knew she wanted it. "Staple?" Louder, more high pitched. "Collate?"

Amy came undone in his arms, and Sheldon helped to press her face into his tee shirt, letting the fabric muffle her screams. At last, she quieted, and she looked up at him with heavily lidded eyes. "Photocopy. Now."

* * *

"Whoa," Amy heaved out.

"Agreed," Sheldon panted, grabbing her hand between them. Sweat seemed to drench every inch of him, so he stretched out like a star, arms and legs spread wide upon their pile of discarded clothing, and he knew Amy did the same. Her heat still radiated in the room. He studied the ceiling tiles above them and sniffed the lingering scent of ink mixed with her arousal. His ears still buzzed with sounds of their lovemaking and the _thhhummmm-whack! _of the copy machine.

"How did you know -" he heard her swallow, trying to wet her parched throat "- how to do that?"

"It was simple once I thought about it. I calculated how our height differential affected the angle of penetration in various positions. I realized that if I changed it by a mere 2.63 degrees, there was a ninety-two percent chance that . . ."

_To be continued . . ._

* * *

_ **Thank you in advance for your reviews!** _


	4. Chapter 4

His pencil scratched on the notepad, a hurried, frantic sound. Running out of space to write, Sheldon flipped the page and frowned. He'd have to start a whole new sheet; he must have been pressing hard in his urgency, for his scribblings had resulted in a page furrowed deeply with the etchings of what he had written on the other side. Undeterred, he continued with his rapid-fire equations, until his pencil snapped.

"Son of a biscuit!" he grumbled.

"Why aren't you using your whiteboards?" Amy asked.

Sheldon looked up at her, wondering when they came in; Hector was perched on her hip. Both of them were in their pajamas, and Amy was doing that one-armed breakfast dance of parents everywhere.

"I needed more room," he explained. "And I didn't want to erase what I had."

"Surely you'll remember it all."

"Yes, but I might need my notes for posterity. Or when this apartment becomes a museum."

Amy chuckled as she reached into a cabinet for a glass. "Maybe it's a good thing that pencil is forcing to you take a break. You need to eat. You were so engrossed in your work you skipped dinner last night."

Had he? Just as Amy said, Sheldon could remember all the math, all the science. He could instantly draw up in his mind exactly what was on the whiteboards behind him, even without looking. But he couldn't recall when he last ate. Or even what that meal had been. Food had become merely a necessary source of fuel for his brain; the taste was not as important as the nutrients it provided.

Amy shifted the glass to the hand wrapped around Hector and reached into the refrigerator to pull out the carton of orange juice. Sheldon watched as she stood in front of the open door to pour it.

And then he saw it. No, not it. _Them_.

Amy poured the juice easily into the glass. Amy's hand shook with the precision it required to do such a task while holding an infant but righted the glass at the last moment. Amy missed the edge of the glass and a trickle of juice poured down the side and dripped onto the floor. Something startled Amy and she dropped the entire carton, orange juice spilling out onto the floor in a series of _glugs_.

All at the exact same time, the images overlapping each other and yet each very distinct.

Sheldon shook his head to clear the confusing imaginary and yelled, "Be careful!"

Startled at his outburst, Amy squeaked and the carton went tumbling to the floor, juice slushing out as it landed. Sheldon stared at the mess, even as Hector started laughing, thinking it had been for his amusement. Just as he'd seen it unfold in his mind, not five seconds earlier. But it hadn't happened yet. But neither had the other three outcomes he'd seen.

"I made you jump. I caused that," he thought aloud, trying to piece it all together.

"Yeah, I noticed. Thanks," Amy huffed, setting down her glass and adjusting Hector as she stretched for a paper towel. "What did you see? A spider?"

He couldn't answer. What would he say? _No, I saw several variations of different realities at the same time. I caused this reality by trying to stop it. _Instead, he got up and put his arms out. "I'm sorry. I don't know what got into me. Here, let me take him while you get your breakfast."

Hector kicked his legs as he taken by his father, and Amy gave him a grateful smile. "_Our_ breakfast. You need to eat, too."

"Of course."

Sheldon settled back on the barstool, sitting Hector on the island in front of him. Supporting his son with one hand, he started to sing the periodic table song to him while using his free hand to sign the abbreviations for each element at the correct time. Always a happy child, Hector giggled and gurgled at him while Amy cleaned the spill and assembled breakfast around them.

"I didn't know you knew sign language," Amy said as she lifted Hector up and away to put him in his high chair.

Sheldon lowered his arm sharply. "I know many things." He didn't add that he appeared to know one more thing this morning than he knew previously, namely American Sign Language.

"Listen, Sheldon, I wanted to . . . suggest something to you," Amy said, taking her seat next to him. The tentative pause made Sheldon's ears perk up.

"Alright."

"I'm thrilled that you've discovered so many new ideas lately, that you're diving back into the world of physics. It's good to see you so excited about your work again." She stopped.

"But?" Sheldon prompted.

Amy took a drink of her juice. "I'm starting to worry about you."

"Worry?"

"Do you feel alright?"

"I've never felt better."

She gave a little sigh and twisted her lips. "I mean . . . do you think you've been a little _too_ immersed in your work?"

"I'm not sure that's possible."

"It is when you forget to eat. Or sleep. Or pay attention to your son."

A spark of anger flared in his chest. "What do you mean? I'm eating now." He tore off a too-large piece of toast with his teeth to prove his point. "And I just instructed our son on the basic building blocks of all matter using a multi-sensory approach to encourage better knowledge retention," he continued with his mouth full. "How is that harming him?"

"Listen," Amy turned to put her hand on his arm, "there's no need to get defensive about it. I know you would never harm your child and I wasn't implying that. I'm just worried about you. You seem distracted. Almost manic. Maybe you should see a doctor."

"Manic? Doctor?" Sheldon stood, pulling away from her. "You didn't think I was manic or ill when I came to your lab to photocopy with you! You thought it was vigorous and orgasmic and whimsically inventive!"

He stomped toward the bedroom and slammed the door behind him. He crossed his arms and fumed silently for a few seconds. How dare she? So it was okay for her to have a professional triumph but not him? She was allowed to work late and be distracted by studying MRI protocols but he wasn't allowed to work out whole new areas of scientific endeavors? She was allowed to leave at all hours of the night to stop jaywalkers but he wasn't allowed to skip a few hours of sleep for his genius?

But then an idea struck him and Sheldon grabbed a new pencil, Amy all but forgotten.

* * *

Sheldon knocked on the open door as he strode into Leonard's lab.

"Hey, bud. What's up?" Lenard asked, removing a pair of safety goggles.

"You need to drive me home. Amy's working late. And we'll have to pick up Hector."

"Okay, sure." Leonard's eyebrows dipped. "But you usually just walk home with the stroller when she's late."

"We also have to stop by the loading dock. I received a package too large to carry on a walk."

"What?" Leonard's eyebrows always seemed to have a life of their own, and they sank even lower.

"I ordered something from Amazon and had it shipped here. It's arrived."

"Um, okay."

As they walked toward the car, Leonard asked, "Hey, did Amy pass her test?"

"What test?"

"You know, CPR and giving shocks and all that. I know she was nervous about it."

Sheldon tilted his head. Amy was nervous about a test administered by the Red Cross? That seemed unlikely. "What gave you that idea?"

"She did. She said so, on Friday night, remember?" Leonard replied as he unlocked the doors.

Friday evening. As Sheldon recalled, he had spent most of the gathering hunched over a notebook, writing down some new ideas. New ideas that were far more interesting than the verbal drivel of his friends. "Advanced Life Support," he supplied, as he buckled his seatbelt. "And it's tomorrow."

"No, it was yesterday. I'm sure of it."

"It couldn't have been. She didn't say anything about it."

"Huh. Maybe it got rescheduled. Or maybe I misunderstood."

"I think we can agree that's the most likely scenario."

Leonard grunted but didn't say anything else as he pulled into the shipping and receiving area at the back of the physics building. "Where do we go? I've never been here."

"It might be easier if you back up, then we can put it in your trunk. They know I'm coming for it."

After the car was parked and the trunk hatch opened, Sheldon and Leonard walked into the loading bay. A few words were exchanged with the employee there and Sheldon signed a clipboard saying he was taking the item.

"That's a big box. What is it?" Leonard said. "I'm not sure it will fit."

"It might have fit if only it were packed more efficiently. We can open it and divide it if we need to." Sheldon shook his head; it was so simple, why couldn't everyone at Amazon see the correct storage capacity and optimal spatial arrangement of any given box? He glanced around and then asked the man he'd just spoken to, "Do you have any smaller boxes we could use?"

"Sure. Here's my box knife."

"Let me take that," Leonard said, snatching the utensil and extending the sharp blade. He opened the box and pulled back the flaps to reveal the contents. "You have got to be kidding me. You ordered all these?"

Reaching inside, Sheldon took a large armful of red notebooks off the top of a stack. "I need them. There are pre-sharpened pencils in there, too. Probably at the bottom."

"You needed, what, three hundred of them?"

"Only two hundred. These should last me a couple of a couple of weeks or so."

Leonard leaned over the box, resting his hands along its stiff cardboard edge. "Sheldon, are you alright?"

"I've never felt better," he answered, pulling out another stack of notebooks to put in the smaller box at his feet. "Why do people keep asking me that?"

"It's just that you been . . . especially . . . let's say _focused_ on your work lately."

"Of course I am. I've had several break-throughs. And I've thought of some new avenues I'd like to explore." When there was no reply, he looked over at Leonard, still bent over the box. Leonard was staring at him with a look that Sheldon couldn't exactly place but that somehow made him uncomfortable. "Chop, chop. They're not going to transfer themselves. And we still have to go get Hector."

* * *

Maybe two hundred notebooks hadn't been enough. Sheldon reached up to rub his eyes and returned to his work. The numbers swam before him: at this rate, he'd be twelve notebooks short at the fourteen-day mark. He should place another order tomorrow.

Different numbers swam before him. He could see them. Sheldon saw equations and diagrams everywhere now, just like that day the car had hit the fire hydrant. Physics, calculus, astronomy, all the higher-order sciences. It's why he needed the notebooks. They came so fast, sometimes overlapping or blinking away when he moved his head. Fearful that it was too much even for his eidetic memory and his superior intelligence, he struggled to record them all. Some were flaws in his previous work, even work he'd been proud of and for which he'd been hailed. Some were completely new ideas, things he'd never considered before, that he was certain no one had ever thought of before. Most were incomplete, nuggets and kernels and seeds of greatness to come.

He needed more time to finish them, to organize all this overwhelming information, to help him make total sense of it. He yawned. He needed more time and yet there wasn't enough of it. Sleep seemed like a waste of time. But he promised Amy he would. When was that? Minutes ago? Hours ago? Yesterday?

He put down his pencil. If he didn't sleep, someone else would ask him if he felt well soon. Today, it had been Raj. Why couldn't they all see that he was just inspired? Surely no one accused Telsa or Einstein or Marie Curie of being ill. Well, until Madame Curie was ill. But that was different. She didn't know what she was working with. Sheldon was just working with numbers and there was nothing radioactive about them.

Regardless, he shut off the lights and stumbled into the bedroom, falling next to Amy on the bed. He was asleep without getting undressed or even crawling under the blankets to hold her.

* * *

"Sheldon, _what_ is going on?"

The numbers stopped swimming before his eyes, and Sheldon squinted to look at her. Even though the room was only lit by a few lamps, her breastplate seemed to blind him. "Amy?"

"What are you doing? What - what is all this?" She swept her arm wide and Sheldon stared after its path.

"Math."

"On our _walls_?"

Sheldon stepped back. Indeed, equations covered the paint, floor to almost ceiling. It went around the corner, too, but he wasn't about to tell her that. "I ran out of space on my whiteboard."

"What about all those notebooks you bought?"

"I didn't want to stop, to get another one out." It sounded so silly now, but at that moment the pull and the force of what he had seen had been too great.

"And so you decided it was a good idea to use markers on our _walls_?" Emphasizing the word a second time seemed to make her even angrier and Sheldon saw her hand ball into a first. He sucked in his breath, waiting for the next sentence she uttered to cause the ground to shake.

But, instead, the crying of a baby pierced the night. Sheldon pivoted and looked behind him, at the play yard that was set up next to the window. Amy's yelling must have startled Hector. His hair fluttered and his mind only registered a streak of red and blue. He couldn't see anything as Amy ran with all her Wonder Amy speed to pick up their crying son, pulling him close to her, shushing softly in his ear.

"Do. You. Have. Any. Idea. What. Time. It. Is." Each word was whispered but with a dagger-sharp point. Nine tiny stabs of anger.

He couldn't answer. It was dark, very dark out the window. Amy had left after a meal, twirling and leaving him to care for Hector. How long had it been? It wasn't a question, though, for she answered for him. "It's ten-thirty. Two and a half hours past his bedtime. Why isn't he sleeping in his crib? Why hasn't he had a bath? Why isn't he wearing his sleepsuit? How long did you leave him in here?"

"He was playing. We got the playpen to contain him now that he's crawling, to keep him safe when we can't engage with him. He was playing quietly and I assumed he fell asleep. I . . . I lost track of time."

"No, you lost track of how to be a father! What if he was only quiet because he'd choked on something? Or been ill? Are you _crazy_? What is wrong with you?"

The crack in her voice caused her to flutter her eyes rapidly and she left to go to Hector's room.

Sheldon could heard her, talking softly to their son, trying to calm him down, reassuring him that nothing was wrong, that he was a good boy, that Daddy was silly, that Mommy wasn't really angry, having a one-sided conversation with herself in which she reasoned that they could skip the bath tonight because it was so late.

Then she started singing softly, and Sheldon sank to the floor, dropping the marker. It was a lullaby of her people, a song about a mother with empty arms, about what a woman wouldn't give for a child. Supposedly the song her mother was singing when Zeus created Amy for her. It was a song Amy sang, her voice heavy and deep, with tears in her eyes as she held her newborn son to her chest the day he was born. Then she had looked up at Sheldon, her eyes bright despite the dark circles beneath them, and said, "Thank you."

"For what?" he'd asked on that day, struggling not to pass out as the midwife dealt with the afterbirth. "You did all the hard work."

"This is our child. My greatest wish, the greatest wish of my people, and you gave him to me."

He leaned against the pillar and allowed a groan to escape from his chest. Then he lowered his head into his arms. What had he done? He had all this math, all this science, at least a dozen break-throughs smeared upon his walls and yet he'd completely forgotten their son. He was in a world of his own making, a beautiful, beautiful world of science, but he was there alone.

"Sheldon? Sheldon, don't cry." Amy pulled him close and wrapped her arms around him. "No harm is done. Hector is fine. The walls can be painted. I'm more worried about you."

"I'm not crying," he sniffled. "But I'm becoming Dr. Sturgis, aren't I?"

"Who's Dr. Sturgis?"

"He could have won the Nobel Prize, he could have been my new PopPop, he could have been happy but he . . ."

He what? The words were not just too terrifying to utter, they were unknown. Had he had a nervous breakdown? Had a psychotic break? A schizophrenic episode with paranoid delusions? Sheldon never knew. He was never told. One day there was brilliant Dr. Sturgis, worthy of Nobel Prize, worthy of MeeMaw, and then, the next, his name was clouded in a whisper. No one ever told Sheldon what went wrong with Dr. Sturgis. "He's feeling poorly and needed to go away to a special hospital for a while," his mother had told him.

"I threw a party and he couldn't come because he went mad," Sheldon finally hiccuped out. Then he looked up her, knowing his face was tear-stained. "They thought I didn't know, but I did. I don't want to be another Dr. Sturgis."

"Oh." Amy pulled him back in tight again. "You're not going mad. You're just . . . exhausted or something. Even if it's a little bit of anxiety, that's an illness, a chemical imbalance that can be treated with the proper therapy. Despite what word I may have used earlier, there's no shame, no stigma anymore."

"I don't want to go to a psychiatrist."

"Okay, we won't start there. Let me take you to my lab. Let me examine your mind. Let's measure some things, let's find some hard data. Then we can form a hypothesis and a plan. Together."

"What if I panic there? With all your interns and students watching?"

"It won't be like that. We'll go after hours. I'll give you a Valium."

He backed away so he could rub his face. "Valium?"

"It will relax you, that's all. We'll do an EEG. And a functional MRI. Think of it as an experiment." She smoothed his hair and brushed a tear away with her thumb, just like his mother used to do after Dr. Sturgis disappeared. "We'll map the greatest brain of our generation. For posterity. For a museum someday."

"Now you're trying to flatter me."

"Is it working?"

Sheldon nodded. "A little."

"Enough?"

"Alright. As long as no one finds out."

_To be continued . . ._

* * *

_ **Thank you in advance for your reviews!** _


	5. Chapter 5

Amy liked her immediately, from that very first meeting at Stark. The neuroradiologist, Dr. Hernandez, was a middle-aged woman with short hair that she had a habit of running her hands through. Her smile was large and her laugh was infectious, causing her whole body to shake; both happened often. She was smart, her mind a repository of all sorts of facts, right when Amy needed them. She was a patient and kind instructor. Amy had learned so much already from her.

And she needed her now.

"Sheldon, this is Dr. Hernandez. I told you about her. She's going to help us this evening."

He looked especially slender and fragile, sitting on the edge of the lab table in just his pants and white undershirt from when Amy had taken his vitals. "M.D. or Ph.D.?" he asked.

"I'm sorry, he's just nervous. He's never had Valium before," Amy apologized. "Maybe we should give him a half dose."

Dr. Hernandez waved away her concerns. "M.D. Residencies in neurology and radiology and a fellowship in nuclear medicine. I've been doing this for nineteen years now. I live alone with my dog, my favorite food is chocolate, and I'm a Leo. Does that cover it?"

"I think so. Although it concerns me you brought your astrological sign into a scientific setting."

"Good. It should. Let's give you this Valium, and then tell me what physical symptoms you're having. Your wife tells me you aren't sleeping much."

* * *

"This doesn't make any sense." Amy glanced over at Dr. Hernandez as she read the monitor near the electroencephalography machine. "When did you last calibrate this? These graphs aren't possible."

Lowering the flashcards, Amy stepped closer to look for herself. Instead of the usual wave-like neural oscillations of someone doing simple math problems or even the frantic spikes of someone having a seizure, all of the waveforms were as high as they could be, only rarely dipping slightly lower. Even the most recent patterns, after Amy stopped quizzing Sheldon. Dr. Hernandez continued, "An amplitude of three hundred millivolts? On every waveform? That's impossible."

Gulping, Amy reached over and flipped the switch off. "We were going to do a functional MRI, anyway. You said we needed a control subject."

"Yes, but I'm not sure someone who's here because he's behaving strangely is that good of a test subject. And we won't be able to compare to these EEG results; they're useless."

Amy glanced at Sheldon. He was wearing the EEG cap with all the white electrodes spilling out of it, and he was sitting quietly in the chair, where he had followed every instruction without complaint or question. He was much calmer than she'd seen him for several weeks now, but his relaxed posture made him also seem exhausted. Well, he probably was. Hopefully, the drug would stay in his system long enough that he'd sleep for hours. She hated to put him through all this without a little relief. But answers would be even better.

"We already gave him the Valium. And I need the practice running the MRI machine. He signed the consent," Amy pointed out, her heart pounding in her chest at the chance that she might lose the one opportunity she had to figure out what was wrong with Sheldon.

The last Few weeks had been nothing short of alarming. Well, not at first. At first, she'd been thrilled for him, that he seemed to have lifted himself out of his funk in the week after the Quidditch match. Yes, he'd seemed a little hyper and talkative and he stayed up later, but he still seemed like Sheldon. Then things started to change. Nights with little sleep become nights without any sleep. She had the feeling he wasn't engaged in their conversations. He started writing in notebooks, something very unusual for him, constantly. He became withdrawn, and sometimes he seemed completely unaware of things happening around him. His friends started to notice and ask her about the changes. The last straw, though, had been the night she'd come back from fighting crime to find he had forgotten to care for Hector.

The Sheldon she knew would never have done that. The Sheldon she knew loved both her and their son with a fierceness that sustained her through the most difficult battles. The Sheldon she loved could be counted on, no matter what, to protect and care for his family. To fight for them. Not to become oblivious to them.

"Please," Amy begged, "we need your help."

Dr. Hernandez looked at her a moment and then nodded. "Okay. As you said, this is just as much about your training as it is him. So I'm going to be evaluating you."

"Of course."

"And, if you really think he's suffering from some sort of manic episode, you should take him to a doctor, you know. Not me; mental health isn't my area of expertise."

"Of course. I will." It was unlikely, but she had to lie. "Let's get him into the MRI." She turned and said to her husband, "Sheldon, we're moving to the MRI now."

"Okay-dokey. Whatever you say," he said with shrug. Even with a half dose of Valium, he seemed almost intoxicated. To be safe, Amy held his arm all the way to the machine and she assisted him in getting onto the MRI bed.

Positioning his head in the coil was simple, and Amy put the headphones over his ears with a smile. "Just relax. This is so you can hear me. I'll be giving you instructions, things to think about, problems to solve, okay? You just think about the ideas and the answers, you don't have to say anything. Remember, try not to move, but if you need us to stop for any reason, raise your arm."

With a squeeze to his hand, Amy walked with Dr. Hernandez to the operators' booth. She turned on the microphone but turned the volume down for Sheldon's sensitive ears. Looking at the window, she studied his long, lean body on the bed, grateful that it was an open-sided machine so that she could see most of him. His head was hidden from view, but she cued up the monitor so that she could see the small square of his exposed face. His eyes were open and it looked as if he was staring right at her, deep into her soul, and Amy shivered slightly.

"Ready?" Dr. Hernandez asked, picking up her clipboard.

"Oh, yes." Amy shook off the sense of discomfort and set the localizers to help her plan her future scans. "Sheldon, blink once if you can hear me," she said into the microphone.

After he did so, Amy started the steps she'd studied and memorized. She suggested a few control images and simple arithmetic problems to Sheldon and watched as various parts of his brain lit up. Proceeding through various planes, setting various flares, she continued to speak to him, watching the square of his face for any signs of discomfort; but he remained passive, his blue eyes piercing her from the screen.

Her concentration was so great that she jumped when Dr. Hernandez bent over her. "Wait a minute," her colleague murmured. "Look at that," she pointed to the current scan on the screen. "A question about geography shouldn't have caused that."

Amy suggested, "We know that almost all areas of the brain are active at all times; that we only use ten percent of our brains at a time is a myth."

She remembered the analogy one of her early professors had used: think of the brain like a stove and each area a burner with a pot of water on top. Every burner was turned on at all times. If a burner was turned off, then the water went cold and was useless. In other words, that burner was malfunctioning. Instead, all the burners were running continuously, even when a person slept, although most were turned down low, just enough to keep the water at a bare simmer so that the water was hot and ready for use. Only a few burners, alone or in combination, were turned up higher; maybe one would occasionally cause a full, roiling boil for some intensive task, but usually, the active burners were causing more of a soft boil.

"That's true, but still a functional MRI is designed to highlight only those areas in which the activity is over a pre-determined threshold in order to weed out subconscious or automatic functions," Dr. Hernandez reminded her.

"It's not that that part of his brain isn't working or shouldn't be working, it's just that it shouldn't be working that much right now, not in response to this exact stimulus," Amy added.

"Exactly."

"So maybe it's an artifact?"

"Probably. Keep going."

"Think of what a kangaroo looks like," Amy instructed Sheldon through the microphone.

Another scan was taken, the clanging of the machine in the background further putting Amy's nerves on edge. Not just that she had to pass this evaluation for her work, but her concern about Sheldon. There it was again: the unexpected hot spot remained. "It's more wide-spread," she said. "Strange."

"Let me try." Dr. Hernandez leaned toward the microphone and changed topics entirely. The next scan was different as Sheldon's brain switched gears. But not completely.

"Maybe it's a lingering thought," Amy suggested. "We gave him a visual instruction, and it's still in his occipital lobe. He has an eidetic memory; maybe it's holding onto the idea?"

Dr. Hernandez shook her head. "Ethical questions should light up just the frontal lobe. Even a so-called lingering thought shouldn't be visual at this threshold level."

Another question, another scan, another shift in pattern. A part of Amy felt like a voyeur with Sheldon's brain stripped naked in front of her like this. He had to be embarrassed. Sheldon believed walking around the apartment barefoot was akin to public nudity, but Amy knew that he would rather streak through the middle of a Quidditch game than let a stranger see his mind in the buff.

"It's getting worse." Dr. Hernandez ran her hand through her hair, causing it to stand up. "If these are accurate - and I calibrated the machine myself this morning - it means his brain is functioning at an abnormally high capacity. This level of neural traffic is unheard of."

"He's almost boiling . . . everywhere," Amy murmured.

"Boiling?" Dr. Hernandez asked. "What was his temperature again?"

"Ninety-eight-point-six on the dot." Sheldon was always very proud of that, his textbook body temperature.

"So, not a fever. And no other symptoms of meningitis." She shook her head. "Zoom in on the meninges, anyway."

Altering the scan and the view as instructed, both women leaned forward to look at it more closely. Meningitis would be horrible, one of the most deadliest infections known to the neurological world. Amy never thought that she'd spend even one second hoping for someone she knew to have it; however, at that moment, it would have been a relief to find meningitis as the answer. But, even as Sheldon's brain continued to light up ever brighter, the meninges were normal.

"Well, it was worth a look," Dr. Hernandez said. She put her fingers over her mouth and squinted her eyes in concentration.

Amy envied the cool clinical detachment Dr. Hernandez was able to maintain. She could almost see the wheels turning as she adjusted the buttons and options on the computer to change the scans. Usually, it was something Amy prided herself on, but it was almost impossible to remain objective when it was Sheldon on whom she was running all these tests, when it was her husband who was ill. But Dr. Hernandez was able to step back, to see the larger picture, to see the flaws and errors that Amy was too emotionally involved in to identify. She smoothly solved them, giving Amy calm suggestions on how to improve her work. This was supposed to be her evaluation, to get her certification to run the MRI, but Dr. Hernandez was helping her.

Only able to watch, helpless, Amy remained silent as the scans kept progressing, brighter and bolder, the pattern of activity spreading wider and wider. Neither of them said it, but this correlated with the EEG they had done earlier, the one they stopped and discounted because the results were deemed impossible.

"The problem isn't that he's using all of his brain," Dr. Hernandez said, clearly thinking aloud, "because, as we said, everyone uses all of their brain, more or less, at all times. But it's as though every single section of his brain is being used almost to its fullest capacity at all times. These results are almost off the chart. But not quite."

Amy shuddered at the realization of what her college was saying. "Not quite _yet_. It could get worse. And no one knows -"

"How detrimental that would be to the human brain," Dr. Hernandez finished for her.

Struck by an idea, a tiny hope that it was all just claustrophobia or embarrassment or a side effect of the Valium, Amy lurched forward and tried to whisper soothingly into the microphone, "It's okay, Sheldon. It will be okay. Just think about me. Think of Amy."

They watched, breathless, as the next several scans shifted. Everything softened, the colors dimmed and contracted until all that was left was a glow in the frontal lobe. Amy left out a long breath.

"The orbitofrontal cortex, right where it should be," Dr. Hernandez said with a chuckle. "The love spot."

Surprised by how emotional the sight made her, Amy swallowed away the dampness rising in her throat and put in the keystrokes to print the image. No matter what happened next, no matter what else she discovered, no matter how much worse Sheldon became, she would have this image to remember what it looked like when Sheldon thought of her.

"Well, that worked. So it _is_ reversible. For now. But . . ." Dr. Hernandez ran her hand through her hair again and it seemed like the only thing left to do.

"It's almost like his brain needs a reboot," Amy said, chewing her lower lip in concentration as she studied the MRI images before her.

"A reboot?"

"Yeah, you know, like a computer." Or a relationship, she did not add aloud, thinking of the metaphor Sheldon had used once. "If you confuse it with too many commands at once, if the processor speed can't handle it, it starts a cascade of failures, even as it tries to correct itself. It heats up, it runs too fast, and then it . . . freezes. So you have to reboot it."

"It's an interesting idea, in theory," Dr. Hernandez said, saddling closer to her. Then she shook her head. "But it would never work in practice. You can't reboot the human brain. Stopping the brain so that it can regather and start again, shutting it down completely . . ." She let the end of her sentence trail.

Amy turned over her shoulder to look at her colleague, her thumb grazing a button on the console in front of her. "That's death."

Dr. Hernandez gave her a single, sad nod of affirmation. She reached forward and pulled Amy away from the console, shutting off the monitors and some other switches.

"Brain death," Amy continued, unable to stop herself from saying the horrible words. Because saying them was much easier than thinking about them, absorbing what truly impossible thing they meant. "You have to stop the brain completely. And then - And then there's almost no chance to restart it."

"None, really," Dr. Hernandez whispered. As she rested her hand on Amy's shoulder, she said, "I'm sorry; there doesn't seem to be any solution."

"I refuse to accept that," Amy countered. "There has to be a way. Something started this - this cascade failure in him. It's just finding the flaw in the code. There must be a way. I just need to study these images more, decipher their meaning, do research into abnormally high neural activity. I can do it."

"I know this is upsetting. But you can't just force science to give you the answers. You need to take him to a hospital. There are other avenues to explore, but they need to be explored there; maybe it's all caused by a chemical imbalance and some medication will help."

But even Dr. Hernandez didn't sound like she believed that. Amy shivered, remembering Sheldon's vulnerability when he told her about Dr. Sturgis. "I need to take him home first. Let him sleep off the Valium. I can decide there."

"Alright. But you'll have to do something soon. It may be getting worse; you said his symptoms have increased."

"I know. But let me take him home first." A single tear fell down her cheek, and she didn't bother to brush it away. She still felt too shocked to cry; she hadn't expected tears yet. But it seemed that all the panic and terror and devastation welling up inside of her was too great and sought its own to escape.

"I'll help you get him to the car."

"No, I can manage."

They discussed the logistics a bit more until Amy convinced Dr. Hernandez that she really could maneuver her drugged husband out the door. As the other woman left, Amy felt a depth of friendship for her, that her presence and knowledge and kindness on this most difficult of evenings could never be repaid.

Once the lab was otherwise empty, Amy put things away and turned down the lights. Sheldon had fallen asleep on the MRI bed, the Valium having its full effect. Amy reached down and kissed him softly, washing her tears off of his face, before she picked him up in her arms, as easily as if he were a child, and carried him home.

* * *

Synesthesia. Sheldon had always had it, but something changed inside the MRI tube. It changed and it grew and it converged with whatever had been giving him so many brilliant ideas for a few weeks now. Maybe it was the Valium.

"Think of what a kangaroo looks like." He did. But the word kangaroo was gold and tasted like a tomato, fresh from the garden. The smell of wheat permeated the air. He heard a piccolo as the kangaroo hopped across the outback. He knew it all instantly, even without the diagrams: how fast it could travel, how high it would jump, how large the joey in its pouch was. His fingers tingled from the feel of its course fur beneath his hands. His skin flushed from the Australian sun. Who first called it a kangaroo, where the English word first appeared in print, what it was called in all the other languages as they rolled through his head. He saw all of the kangaroos, from the dawn of time. How many there would be today if Captain Cook had never discovered Australia. How many would die in the next one hundred years. And all the empirical evidence that could prove that the koala was, in fact, the superior marsupial.

He closed his eyes as the instructions kept coming, and he let it all wash over him: a kaleidoscope of colors, of sounds, of tastes, of textures. He saw realities and possibilities and conclusions. Images overlapped and danced and shifted. Knowledge came, no longer as equations, long strings of symbols and numbers for him to follow, but instead as a whole thing, complete and certain. Nothing to follow for he was already there. And there was everywhere. Anywhere he wanted to be.

"It's okay, Sheldon. It will be okay. Just think about me. Think of Amy."

Amy was vivid red and dark blue and light gold. She was bright like the stars and dark like a secret. She tasted of salty sea and bitter ash. She smelled strong like courage and faint like paper. She sounded like the boom of a thunderstorm and the gentle hush of a mother's song. She felt like both iron and wool. She was contradictions and coincidences.

He concentrated on Amy. Her smile. Her green eyes. The soft press of her lips, the strength in her arms. The pounding in his chest. The first time he saw her, the soft fuzz of her sweater and her evasive walk, a woman of mystery. The first time he'd actually met her, the bounce in her hair, the flapping of her skirt, a woman of confidence. The first time she spoke to him, the way she turned and looked over her shoulder at him. For a moment, everything else faded: all the sounds, all the colors. A reprieve. A single, silent, still image. A wink, frozen in time, like a painting. A woman who was an invitation to follow.

Amy. But there was nothing left to follow for Amy was already here. Amy was already everything, she was already just Amy. Everything had coalesced into just Amy: she was both the riddle and the solution. Amy was where he wanted to be.

Suddenly, he heard a crackle in his headphones, and the cacophony came rushing back: the colors, the sounds, the tastes, the images.

"That's death," Amy's voice said.

Death? He was supposed to think of death? Death was empty. Why had Amy mentioned death? Did Amy think he was going to die? But he felt excellent.

Sheldon dismissed the thought and all the coldness it brought. How absurd. It must just be another effect of the Valium. Not only was it making him see and taste and feel things that weren't there, but it was also making him have ridiculous thoughts. She was talking about something else. Amy would never let him die; she protected him at all costs.

Amy. He concentrated on her, on her innate goodness and love, on her wisdom and intelligence. On her wink. He would follow her.

Nothing more was said and he felt sleep coming, like a vacuum swallowing the sky. He watched it approach, like the tide. Amy waved him toward the silent water. She wanted him to allow himself to be pulled under, to make him free. He concentrated on Amy and followed her, letting her sweet stillness cover over him as he sank into slumber.

_To be continued . . ._

* * *

_ **Thank you in advance for your reviews!** _


	6. Chapter 6

Panic crawled up the back of her throat, and Amy pushed it down with a swallow. It was just a matter of time. A matter that required more time, extra hours in the day. A matter that required more thought; even after a sleepless night, she didn't have a single idea but the one that brought her to this moment.

Hector babbled on her hip, and Amy kissed his chubby cheek. This was just a precaution. An unnecessary precaution. A mother's overreaction. Just a way to buy herself the time she so desperately needed. Hector would be fine; Amy had turned out wonderfully, hadn't she? He wouldn't even remember this sojourn.

There was Sheldon to save, and she couldn't do that standing in the hallway letting her feelings get out of control. Amy took a deep breath, in through her nose and out between her lips, knocked on the door to 4A, and plastered the expected smile upon her face.

"Ames!" Penny grinned back as she opened the door, pulling her pink robe tighter around her. "You don't have to knock."

"Yes, I do." Amy and Sheldon always kept their door locked, just in case she was coming or going as Wonder Amy, but their friends and upstairs neighbors seemed to have no secrets. Which probably explained why they were so loud all the time. "You weren't expecting me. And it's early."

"Hi, Amy. And Hector!" Leonard, also in his robe, put his arms out and Amy passed the boy over for his uncle to make faces and raspberries at him. "Do you want some breakfast? Need to borrow some milk?"

"No, thank you. I just came to let you know Sheldon would be home alone today. So, um, you know, just be aware if you hear anything strange."

"Is he doing some kind of experiment? Does he need my help?" Leonard asked.

"No. I think he'll just be working. He's not awake yet." Sheldon was still knocked out from the Valium last night, even though it had only been a half-dose. After a night sitting up watching him sleep and worrying about him, Amy had made her decision in the wee hours of the morning and taken the opportunity to pack up some of their son's belongings.

"Where are you going?" Penny asked, leaning to look over her shoulder at the suitcase Amy left standing in the hallway.

Taking a deep breath, Amy recited her practiced lie. It should have been easy, given the lies she told all the time to protect her superhero status, but she had discovered that motivation made all the difference. "I'm taking Hector to visit my great-aunt, Flora." Then another deep breath. "Actually, she'd going to be watching him for a - a few days at least."

"Huh? This aunt we've never heard about is going to watch your baby for a _few days_?" Penny asked, crossing her arms.

Possibly weeks, but Amy did not say that as Penny's reaction was making her doubt her perceived veracity. Maybe motivation made a difference in how convincing Amy could make her lies. "I don't want to worry you, but Sheldon is . . . he's sick."

"Sick? Sick how?" Leonard queried.

"I don't know, not really." Amy coughed to hide her faltering voice and then stuck to skating over the truth. She'd promised Sheldon she wouldn't tell anyone about the tests in her lab, but not that something was wrong. After all, his friends were already asking about him. "It's something neurological, I think. So it's probably best for Hector to go somewhere someone can look after him properly."

Penny gasped. "Do you think Sheldon would hurt Hector? Oh my God, are you okay, Amy? Do you need to stay here?" Penny put a hand on her shoulder.

"No!" Penny snapped her hand away and Amy shook her head. "Sorry, it's not you. But Sheldon can't hurt me. I mean, he _wouldn't _hurt me. Or Hector. I'm sure of that."

She had never considered Sheldon harming her because it was impossible. Wasn't it? No, he wasn't violent. All of his symptoms seemed to be directed inward, not outward, as he became ever more obsessed with his equations and ever less aware of his surroundings. "No, I'm only taking Hector away because I need time to study Sheldon's illness, to come up with a solution without distraction. And my aunt has been clamoring for him to visit."

"Has he seen a doctor? I mean, you know I think you're a brilliant scientist, Amy, but you're a metahuman researcher. If Sheldon is sick, he needs a medical doctor," Leonard pointed out. "You know, I may have all his doctors listed in an old copy of The Roommate Agreement around here somewhere. I thought he already had a specialist lined up for everything."

"I'm not convinced . . . It's not clear that it's that kind of medical problem," Amy answered. "You, um, know how he is. My mother had me tested and all that."

"Ohhhhh," Penny said, her lips puckering. "Now I wish I'd never called him Dr. Wackadoodle."

"Do you want my mother's phone number?" Leonard offered. "I know Sheldon hates psychiatrists, but he's always liked her for some reason. In fact, he might be the only person who does. He might talk to her."

"Maybe. I think I already have her number, though." Amy took a deep breath. "Anyway, I just wanted you to be aware of where things stood. And maybe one of you could find an excuse to go down and check on him? I left him a note."

"Okay. Sure, sweetie." Penny reached out and pulled her into a hug. "Stay strong."

In circumstances with lower stakes, Amy might have smiled at the irony. Instead, she said, "I will."

Gathering Hector back into her arms, she turned to leave just as Penny asked, "Wait! Where does your aunt live? When will you be back?"

"Um, Bakersfield. I'll stay a few hours and make sure Hector is settled. It will probably be late." A thought crossed her mind, and Amy stepped toward Leonard. "Has Sheldon ever talked to you about Dr. Sturgis?"

Lenard's eyebrows shifted. "No, I don't think. Do you know the first name? Are they at Caltech?"

"No, it's someone from when he was a child in Texas."

Shaking his head, Leonard said, "No, I don't think so. Have you asked Mary yet?"

"I haven't told her anything. I don't want to worry her, at least not until I have some answers." She didn't add the last thing she needed was Mary Cooper, no matter how kind and well-intentioned, bringing a faith healer into the crisis. "Never mind. I doubt it's important. It's just something Sheldon said. We should be going."

"Okay. Be careful. Call if you need anything," Penny said as Amy waved good-bye.

* * *

Amy set her invisible jet down on the sand and turned off the engine. Already walking down the path of the cliffside where a group of women to meet them. Hugs and greetings were exchanged along with coos and exclamations over how much Hector had grown. Amy found some sort of relief that it was, in fact, her aunt who carried the young boy back up the path. One less lie she'd told.

Nothing of depth had been said to her mother when she informed her she was bringing Hector to the island, but Amy was not surprised when Hippolyta lingered by the edge of the sea with her. "You are wearing many layers of clothing. I do not see how you move in that attire."

Amy glanced down at her cardigan and skirt, her heavy shoes sinking into the sand. "I didn't have time to change." But the clothes of Dr. Fowler _were_ too warm and restrictive, so she peeled offer her cardigan.

"Where is Sheldon? I know he does not like the jet, but he usually accompanies you."

"He's at home. Sleeping." Amy shifted. "He was - I left on short notice."

"I see. You know this is your home and you are always welcome, but the little notice you gave concerns me."

"I'm sorry. It's just been a while since you've seen Hector in person. I thought I'd surprise you."

"Amy, my child," Hippolyta brush back some of Amy's straight Dr. Fowler hair, and Amy closed her eyes at the loving touch, "please tell me what troubles you."

"How do you know anything troubles me?"

"I've lived for centuries as leader of a tribe of passionate women. Emotions are not foreign to me."

There was no use hiding it, not from her mother, the queen who always seemed to know everything. "It's Sheldon. He's ill."

"Ill?" Hippolyta's eyes widened. "I thought that your science, your medicine . . . is it serious?"

"It is. That is why I brought Hector to you."

Hippolyta's eyes softened and Amy submitted herself to her study. "You look tired. Older."

"Well, I am. Technically." Amy studied her mother in return. The two women looked closer to the same age now rather than mother and daughter. Each visit home revived Amy and stalled the progression of time, but it still beat on for her outside of this place. Yes, she seemed to age with less speed than the humans around her, but she aged nonetheless. "But, yes, I am tired, also."

"Will you remain here, with us? It would be better for your health. And perhaps that of the child."

Amy shook her head. "I cannot. There is Sheldon to consider. I have to return and care for him."

"Then after he is well? Perhaps it is not merely Sheldon's illness that tires you, it is life beyond the veil."

It was not a new argument from her mother; it was one Amy had fought for years. "I have told you I cannot. I love the life I've created there. I have a career in science. Hector is healthy. I am healthy. I am still stronger than all the humans around me. I still heal faster than they do. Beyond all that, though, there is Sheldon. He is ill and he needs me. I love him above all else. It is only my concern for him that exhausts me right now."

It crossed Amy's mind to remind her mother she had spent years in only the female companionship of those elder than her, and that they could not understand the life she had chosen, away from this island. They could not prepare her for the fight necessary to be a superhero or the comprises of romantic love. Those she had learned on her own.

But she didn't have any fight in her right now. Thinking about time and Sheldon's illness only weighed her down. How much time would she have with Sheldon? How long would she continue strong and healthy as his body began to fail, even if his mind survived this new illness? How long would she have to live, in the end, without him? For he was only human. She could return here then, probably as an old woman, and remain that way for decades. Perhaps, with time, she would even start to grow young again. But she would not have Sheldon.

Hippolyta chuckled, and Amy looked over at her in surprise. "It is easy to forget how fragile we humans were before the veil."

Amy pushed her shoulders back. "Sheldon is the strongest man I know. In other ways. In ways that matter most. He fought harder for me than I deserve."

"Oh! " Hippolyta's eyes widened. "I apologize. Truly." She reached for her hand and grasped it. "Sheldon has his own form of strength, and it is that you love. If he fights for you and loves you in equal measure, then he is admirable. And wise." Hippolyta smoothed Amy's hair with her palm. "Tell me about his illness. We have lived here so long, I fear we have forgotten the struggles of those beyond the veil. Here, the only danger for our bodies is an injury."

"It is not his body. Something is wrong with his mind. I studied it in my lab. His brain is working too hard, too fast." Amy struggled for the words to explain something she did not understand to her mother. "It seems to be unsettling him."

"You told me once, when he seemed bored here, that his mind needs work. I remember him writing equations in the sand."

Amy smiled at the memory. "Yes, but now it is overstimulated. From within. I need to find a way to stop the process. I need time to fight for him, Mother, without distraction. It is why I brought Hector to you."

"If there is a fight, then you will prevail. You always do."

"When I say fight, I mean using science. My powers are of no use to me in this." She took a deep breath and tried to fight for control of her voice. "Mother, I am frightened. I - I love him so much. He is not just the father of my child, he is everything to me. I don't know what is wrong or how to fix it. I fear that if I don't find the answers I need soon enough, it will kill him. Or damage his mind forever. He is only human, Mother, and weak because of it. For once, my strength and powers mean nothing. It is not a battle against an enemy I can see and best with my might. I can only fight for him . . . for his humanity. But I'm not human; what if I'm not enough? What if being human is the secret?"

Her mother's arm encircled her and held her close, just as she had done many times when Amy was a child when she suffered one of those injuries that would heal within minutes or, at most, hours. "What I wouldn't give to be able to save him with my powers," her voice faltered, her mother's kindness breaking down the barrier she was working hard to keep in place.

"How far would you go for your love? How much would you risk? What is the sacrifice you would make to save him?"

"Myself," Amy sniffed, reaching up to brush away a tear.

"Amy, if you love him this much, then love is your power. The answer is within you."

"I wish that it were."

"It is. You just have to find it."

* * *

She had no real memory of walking there, but Amy blinked as her eyes adjusted to the bright lights of the comic book store.

"Amy? What brings you in by yourself?" Stuart looked confused from behind the cash register, and it made Amy realize she'd never come here without Sheldon before.

"Um, just browsing, I guess."

She had no use for comic books; when she wasn't dressed in her armor, she wanted to relax and not have to think about battling villains. But tonight, battles were on her mind after her conversation with her mother; she wanted to open a book and see the realities oversimplified in bright cheerful colors. A world where obstacles were overcome with just a Swoop! or a Pow!, a world where the gold wasn't too heavy.

"You got here just in time, I was about to lock the door."

"Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realize the time. I've been traveling. I'll leave."

"No, no, stay." Stuart rounded the counter to pass her. "I could use the company while I close up." He flipped off the neon sign and locked the door behind her. "So, what are you browsing for? Looking for a gift for Sheldon? How's he feeling, by the way? Howard said he was sick and working from home."

"Oh. Um, well, he is." Amy bit her lip. When was the last time she'd seen Sheldon read a comic book? Certainly before his new symptoms all started. "Yes, I think I'll buy him something. Might get his mind off of . . . everything. Is there anything you think he'd especially like?"

Stuart picked up a broom resting in the corner and rested his hands on the top. "Well, there's not a lot he hasn't read." He snapped his fingers. "How about Wonder Amy?"

Amy tried not to look alarmed at the suggestion. "Wonder Amy? He really likes her?"

"Well, that's just it. He used to. And then he just stopped reading about her. Right about the time she started - Um, never mind."

Narrowing her eyes, Amy said, "Wonder Amy started what?"

Stuart made an uncomfortable sound. "Well, you know. Showing up at parks and places when he's there. Um, flirting."

"Ah." Amy allowed herself a small smile and put a hand on her hip. "Wonder Amy's interest in Sheldon is not news to me. But, believe me, Wonder Amy has nothing I don't I have."

"Um, okay." Stuart swallowed. "I just assumed you disapproved and that's why he stopped. It was about the time you two started dating."

"Is_ that _what he said?"

"No. He said they gave him heartburn. Or was it nausea? Sometimes I get my symptoms confused with everyone else's."

So Sheldon had stopped reading about her battles because they frightened him. It wasn't a surprise; more than once, she'd come home injured to find him pacing with fear on his face, waiting for her, even as he took the steps necessary to aid in her recovery. But that only served to underscore how distracted his illness was making him. Amy realized that if she showed up injured now, it was very possible he wouldn't even notice.

"Where are her comics? Maybe I can find one to remind him of Wonder Amy."

Stuart's eyebrows went up and then he mumbled, "A wife who encourages sexual fantasies with a superwoman. Sheldon, you lucky dog."

Ignoring him, Amy followed Stuart to the section he pointed out. She picked up the first issue and he started to sweep the floor behind her.

**Wonder Amy Stops Griffith Observatory Crisis!  
** **Outer space is saved for all humankind!**

Huh? Inspecting the cover further she almost snorted. She read it aloud to Stuart and then asked, "Is this about the time the screw came loose in the telescope and it almost crushed a visitor?"

"Yeah."

"But that's not actually saving space for all mankind, is it?"

Stuart shrugged as he swept. "Maybe that guy was an astronaut. You don't know."

Except she did. He was a banker from Ohio on vacation. Amy flipped through a few more of the titles, pushing aside the unsettling feeling of seeing herself illustrated on the covers. Were her exploits really given to so much hyperbole? Were her breasts really so large? But then she saw one that was different than all the others and she pulled it out to inspect it further; on the front, she looked like she was floating with her eyes closed in a field of blue. She looked peaceful.

**Wonder Amy's Hour of Mystery!  
** **What REALLY happened at the bottom of the ocean?**

Intrigued, Amy flipped a few pages. "Is this about the plane crash?" she gasped. Why would anyone want to read about that? Her largest failure? The plane she couldn't keep in the air, the passengers she couldn't save?

Stuart stepped closer to look over her shoulder. "Oh, yeah. That one was a bestseller when it came out. Everyone said it was a miracle."

"But I - I mean, everyone died, how is that a miracle?" Amy asked.

"That's just it. She should have died, too. We all thought she drowned. Don't you remember? No one saw her come up out of the ocean, and then like three days later, she was back. But the cameras were on the spot she went down for like an hour or something before it got too dark to see and they stopped reporting."

But that's not what happened. Amy remembered the night clearly: the failure, the heartache, the indescribable physical pain. Sinking to the bottom of the ocean and her initial desire to give up. And then, with crystal clarity, Sheldon's name coming to her and her decision to fight to return to him. Parkouring over the city, each breath a stab; she thought she'd broken a rib somewhere under her armor. Blood still dripping down her face and blocking her view, her arm on fire as blisters arose and spread. Piercing pain shot up from her ankle with each leap she took, only to be surpassed by the agony of landing on it.

"But - but it didn't take that long. It couldn't have," she protested to Stuart. It had taken her far longer to return home to him in her injured state; the cameras must have missed her swimming to the shore. "It could have only been a few minutes at most."

"Nope. Here, I'll show you."

He reached for the comic book and turned to a two-page spread. It was the same image as on the front but larger, the edges of the page filled with sea life and debris from the broken plane and, in the very corners, the bright searchlights of the Coast Guard ships. But their beams did not reach the inky depth of Wonder Amy in the center. Across the bottom was a long, thin text box: "All hope lost, the world mourned its beautiful goddess, believing she rested forever in a watery grave."

"See, the divers and ships are turning around," Stuart pointed and continued. "She was definitely underwater for at least an hour. Go rewatch the footage online. If you're interested, I have a _What If?_ issue around here where Aquaman came and gave her mouth to mouth to save her. It's kind of racy."

"Aquaman?" Amy curled her lip in distaste. He was not there. She would have smelled him; that man always reeked of raw fish. "No, Wonder Amy saved herself. She didn't need Aquaman or any other superhero."

Just Sheldon, she didn't add. A human.

"See? A miracle. I mean, maybe all metahumans can survive being underwater that long, but no one's tested them. But if not, it's like humans. First, the mind goes, then the body. You know, you're into brains. Oh! That should be your next study."

Amy snapped the comic book out his hands and ran her fingertips over the picture of Wonder Amy, her dark curls circling her like a halo, her golden tiara bright even in the midst of the inky darkness.

She replayed it all again. At first, Amy fought, fought to breathe even as she struggled to free herself from the wreckage. But, once free, all of the fight in her dissipated. Why live if she would only fail? She gave up and closed her eyes until she heard - felt? - Sheldon's name. Only then did she reopen them and push off the sandy floor, screaming into the water in pain.

Back again to that moment. She closed her eyes. She gave into the nothingness, the silence like a vacuum. An emptiness such as she'd never before known. Until she realized she would never be empty if she had Sheldon. Sheldon had filled the emptiness inside of her. His name came like a light in the darkness. It was only a moment; wasn't it? A void and then a light.

"It could have been an hour. She could have been . . . " she whispered. She looked up sharply at Stuart. "Because Wonder Amy heals quickly."

"Exactly. So it was either a resurrection or just another superpower: the ability to stay underwater without going, you know." He made a low, long tone and ran his hand straight through the air in a flat line. "Like my bank account," he added.

"How much is this?" Amy asked. "I want this one."

Stuart shrugged. "You know what? It's on the house. Just give me one percent of the proceeds you earn from your study on it. It's more than I'm earning now."

But Amy scrambled in her purse and pulled out the first bill she saw and shoved it into Stuart's palm. "Thank you."

Reining in her desire to run out of the store, she clutched the comic book tighter and skipped to unlock the door and then down the sidewalk. Just as the door was closing behind her, she heard Stuart call, "This is a ten! That issue is marked $12.95! Just saying!"

_To be continued . . ._

* * *

_ **Thank you in advance for your reviews!** _


	7. Chapter 7

"Sheldon! Oh, good, you're awake."

He glanced away from his whiteboard as Amy entered the apartment, but his eyes quickly darted back. "Of course I am. Do you think I would fritter away a whole twenty-hours with sleep? Fourteen was wasteful enough. I have work to do."

"But did you sleep well?"

"If by well you mean too long, then yes." He paused to change an integer in front of him. "Although, I think a valid argument could be made that the increased REM cycles lowered my norepinephrine levels further. "

"Yes! Yes, they do. So you feel well?"

"I feel better than I've ever felt before, Amy." Sheldon wrote out a few more numbers as he spoke; he didn't even have to stop working to converse with her. "I had such vivid dreams and then I woke up a new person. I only thought I was intelligent, but now I realize I was merely above average. Now I see the world as a kaleidoscope of ideas, beyond the grasp of any human before me."

Quite literally a kaleidoscope of ideas: every thought, every sound, every word he saw, and every number he wrote exploded in his brain with wave after wave of color. As Sheldon worked on his equations, his math left a trail of colorful prisms streaming from the whiteboard. He remembered being worried in the MRI tube that it was a concerning side effect of the Valium. But now he realized the change in his synesthesia symptoms was only a positive event: errors were black and painful to his ears, and the better his ideas the brighter the colors. He could even, he thought with a small smile, taste the rainbow.

Amy made some sort of uncomfortable cough, and Sheldon saw her approach from the corner of his eye. "You, um, got my note?"

"Indeed." He growled and swiped away a line of work with the eraser. The only problem he couldn't solve, the only one that was black after black after black was super asymmetry. "It's not necessary to write in your ancient Greek dialect, you know. No one we know speaks even modern Greek."

"Oh, were you not able to understand it?"

Another flick of his eyes in her direction. "I understood every word." He had, without the effort of before; he read it as easily as he read English in his own handwriting. "You took Hector to Themyscira for an extended visit with your mother and aunts."

"You're - you're okay with that?"

Sheldon frowned. He disliked hearing the trepidation in her voice. She was a strong, powerful woman. He preferred her to act like one. And he didn't have time to coddle her. "I presume you did it so that I wouldn't be distracted."

"So _you_ wouldn't be distracted?"

"Yes, from my work. By a crawling infant. It's probably a worthy plan. At least until I solve the mystery of super asymmetry." He paused. "Thank you."

"Of course." There it was again, that slight halting of her words. "Do you want to talk about the - the tests? I - _we_ learned some things we should discuss."

He waved his hand. "I don't care. Whatever you think you discovered, you're wrong. Your methods are flawed. I am better than I've ever been. Nothing is wrong with me. I should have never allowed you to trick me into it." A tiny sound came from Amy, and he glanced over to see her mouth open in what seemed to be disbelief. "You must be tired from your travels. Perhaps you should rest."

Instead of answering, Amy fled out of the room and slammed the bedroom door behind her. Even through the door, he heard a wail. Sheldon shook his head to drive away a pinprick of discomfort the noise caused. What did a genius have to do to work in peace these days?

* * *

It shouldn't have come as a surprise, not the racking sobs, not the unearthly keening sounds. She'd been holding it in for too long, trying to remain strong, not just for Sheldon and Hector but for everyone: Dr. Hernandez, her other colleagues and students, and her friends. Even when her mother's arms encircled her. But Amy, despite her strength, was not Atlas. There was too much pain in this world for her hold any longer.

Yesterday evening, Sheldon had been nervous and frightened. He'd been trusting and fragile. It broke Amy's heart as she put him to bed, but she could console herself that at least some answers had been obtained. Answers that Sheldon himself genuinely wanted. Yes, those answers had prompted more questions, but she had hopes that, together, they would form a hypothesis, a plan of action, steps to a solution. Yes, he would still be distracted and sleep-deprived, because that was a result of whatever was burning through his brain, but maybe he would begin to focus all that energy on saving himself. Sheldon would be her partner still.

Sheldon, her partner. Her partner in everything. Amy knew it seemed counterintuitive from the outside, but she depended on him for his quiet, hidden strength. There were all the practical aspects: the way he smoothly ran the house or cared for their son when she was out, the way he thought logically about non-super powered solutions to potential barriers and difficulties when she knew a large battle was looming on the horizon. Unable to lie about anything else, he mastered the most complex of subterfuges with ease for her sake.

Even for all that, it was not what Amy valued in him the most. Sheldon was her partner always, but especially in private, the hidden, secret her that no one else understood. When she needed to be reminded she could do what had to be done, that she could achieve almost anything - on the battlefield and in the laboratory. He believed in her, championed for her, cheered her on. He was always there when she needed him; yes, occasionally at the edge of battle with the loudest yell of all, but, more importantly, waiting at home with bandages and a warm bath and a shoulder to cry upon. When all she wanted to do was crumble, she knew she just had to find a way back to him, that he would hold everything for her, if even just for a moment. And he did it all out of love.

He had been that way from the very first, from that night he kissed her forehead and held her while she slept. It was the most peaceful sleep she'd ever known. But she'd been a fool, too frightened of both her past and her future to accept the love he repeatedly, patiently offered her. The love he demonstrated for her, time and time again, even when she told herself she didn't want it, that she didn't deserve it. It was that love that had saved her, not from prison for accidentally creating the mutant monkeys, but from her irrational fears and self-doubt.

Amy raised her head and wiped the tears from her cheeks. Surely there was a lesson in that. Sheldon had saved her once; it had been a lengthy process and he had worked hard for her. But he never gave up even when she ordered him to do so. Then, as a final stroke, he'd researched a field he was not familiar with, he'd applied all his intelligence to a problem he should not have been able to solve. But he had. He'd taken a calculated risk, storming into the courtroom like that. And he'd won.

Once, when Sheldon had saved her, she had been Dr. Fowler by day and Wonder Amy by night. Now she'd do it again, to save him. Dr. Fowler was a neurobiologist and she would work tirelessly during daylight in her lab, doing research, reading textbooks, whatever it took to find a scientific and medical solution to mend Sheldon's broken mind, to bring him back to her. She would just put as much of her other work on hold as she could.

And Wonder Amy would stay up all through the darkness, if necessary, to plan a calculated risk she never wanted to take.

* * *

The third time it happened, it startled him less. Seeing the multiple outcomes of his stepping into the shower was a little disorienting at first, but he realized that grabbing onto the shower curtain to break his fall was something he could choose, instantaneously, even as he saw it happen before him. And that the avoided spill and injury would have only been a result of allowing himself to be frightened by the multiple outcomes in the first place.

Now he saw them everywhere, every choice precipitated by every possible outcome at once. If he expected them and welcomed them, some even came sooner than others. He could select and prepare. Determine which action was the best. Perhaps with time and effort, he could control this power further. Perhaps his synesthesia could help; he already knew what errors looked and sounded like when they happened. Could he harness the sensation sooner? Avoid a mistake with just a taste in the back of his throat?

What couldn't he accomplish? What couldn't he have? Each decision would lead to the next. One positive outcome could lead to another. Wasn't that what luck was? Luck wasn't some random, unknowable, uncontrollable force as those of lesser minds believed. But it did exist, contrary to what he previously thought. He'd just been seeing all wrong before. Luck was a choice made with all the options before him. Luck was one step after another in the proper direction.

Sheldon took a deep breath and settled into his spot. Whiteboards and notebooks were now superfluous crutches to his greatness. He could see it all, every time, in his mind.

There were no surprises left for him. No one could take this power from him.

* * *

"I'd like to check these books out," Amy said, placing the stack on the desk.

"Did you know we have an automated kiosk?" the young woman behind the counter at the UCLA medical library said.

It felt strange to be back here; the last time she was on the UCLA campus she had to fight and put down mutant monkeys of her own creation. "I do, but I can't use it. My card doesn't work on your kiosk. I'm a member of the Caltech research faculty; I'm checking these out via the Caltech-UCLA Medical Scientist partnership." Amy reached into her bag and slid the folded paper across the desk. "I've already filled out my form."

She waited patiently while the young woman - Amy guessed she was a student on a work-study because of her own textbook in front of her - typed on the computer and then scanned the barcodes on the books. She printed out a receipt and put it on top of the stack. "They're due in three weeks. You have to come in person if you want to renew them."

"Thank you. I understand."

"Hematology?" the clerk asked.

"In a sense. I'm studying the blood-brain barrier."

* * *

He'd been correct all along. His spot was the singular location in space around which revolved the entire universe. He'd given it up for a time when he was forced to move across the hallway so that Penny could overtake 4A with Leonard. And then Amy had come along and made him think it wasn't important anymore. For a while, he'd even considered her that singular location, that single point of constancy in his life.

But Sheldon sat in his spot 2.0 in 3A and opened his eyes, taking a deep breath of his pocket universe, and understood that had been a misconception. Already this morning in his spot, he was certain he'd found a way to stop the spread of melanoma, developed the optimal traffic flow for downtown Los Angeles, and devised the chemical formula necessary to kill crabgrass without leaching harmful substances into the soil beneath. Amy had not led him to any of those conclusions; his spot had. Or rather, his brain at peace within the confines of his spot.

A sensation rumbled across his forehead and he reached up to touch it. Amy. Since that night he'd gone to her lab, the thought of her caused a physical reaction in him. Something brief but unavoidable. Always minor, always dull, he would say it most often felt like a tugging. No, that was the wrong descriptor. It was more of a dragging, like something was trying to hold him back. Not painful, but a nuisance. A distraction from all the other important things he should be contemplating.

Perhaps he should apply his improved mental effort to uncovering the cause and the solution to the annoying problem. He would concentrate on Amy and it would come to him as so many brilliant ideas seemed to lately.

He imagined her in their apartment, working in the kitchen, making dinner. Usually, Sheldon cooked, but Amy had skill when she did it. In his mind, he watched her carefully, studying her actions for clues. She was dressed like Wonder Amy, and that was unusual for a kitchen activity. There was a noise and she left the kitchen. Sheldon's head swiveled as he watched her angle toward the play yard, telling Hector it would just be a few more minutes and then she'd get him out and play with him.

A noise caught his attention and he swiveled back to the island. Amy was there, too, but in her cardigan. She looked older. He blinked as he saw himself there, although he was wearing a cobalt blue henley shirt. Strange. They were both drinking tea and smiling. Other-Amy sat next to Other-Sheldon, and they were turned to face each other. Other-Sheldon held a book in his hand, and Other-Amy answered his question with expressive gestures. One more blink and a child ran up to them, a girl with cooper hair glinting down her back.

Before Sheldon could question it too much, there was a whine in the corner and he turned toward it. The playpen was gone; instead, some sort of silver vehicle shuddered into focus, seemingly out of thin air. Amy alighted, but she was younger and wearing a costume, like something out of a Jane Austen novel. A blink and another Sheldon emerged, he, too dressed as though he were in a costume drama. They laughed in the way one does when one has escaped a crisis of sort, a great belly laugh of relief. Another blink, another change: this Amy reached down and picked up a brown-haired baby and twirled with him. It wasn't Hector but he looked similar somehow, like a brother.

A flash of movement and Sheldon looked back toward the kitchen. He was there at the island again but eating this time in his pajamas. Another Amy, with shorter hair, ran up to him from his right. Sheldon realized they were both wearing medals with purple ribbons around their necks. Short-haired-Amy handed Sheldon a stick and he looked at it in shock. Then he got up, picked her up, and twirled her around before kneeling and kissing her stomach.

From his spot, Sheldon slowly surveyed the room. They were all there now, together but separate. Each locked in a repetitive motion: medal-Sheldon kissing short-haired-Amy's belly, cardigan-Amy reading from a book to a little girl as henley-Sheldon looked on, Wonder Amy holding Hector up to pretend fly, costume-Amy passing the baby boy off to costume-Sheldon.

These weren't possible variations of the same event: these were possible variations of the same life. And yet, one thing tied them all together. No, two things. Amy, of course, but also something else, something they created together.

Sheldon got up and ran to the bedroom, flung open the door, and flipped on the light. "Amy, Amy! Wake up!"

"Mmmmm. Huh?" Amy pulled up her elbow to shield her face and squinted into the bright light. "Sheldon? What's wrong?"

"Nothing." He pulled his tee shirts over his head as he kicked his shoes off. "I just realized what we need to do."

"Need to do? Now? What time is it? And why are you taking all your clothes off?"

"Because don't you see? We need to make another baby!"

_To be continued . . ._

* * *

_ **Thank you in advance for your reviews!** _


	8. Chapter 8

He waited until after he heard the bedroom door open and Amy go into the bathroom. He waited until he heard her shuffles down the hallway before he sat up. Once Amy rounded the corner to the kitchen, rubbing her tangled hair out of her eyes, Sheldon got up to follow, pulling at the afghan that had been protecting the sofa from his bare buttocks and wrapping it around him like a skirt.

"Oh, good, you're awake. Now we can resume our conversation."

His wife shot an angry look over the top of her glasses. "I'm pretty sure I ended that conversation last night."

"I'm willing to overlook being shut out of my own bedroom for the sake of this project. Now, the shove out the door without my clothes, that was unnecessary. I notice you're still wearing pajamas."

Amy hadn't even given him a chance to explain his position last night. He'd barely said two sentences when she rose from the bed and used her super strength to push him out the door - naked! - and lock it behind her. All of which was unnecessary; there was no physical way Sheldon could force Amy to do anything against her will. Not to mention that it never occurred to him. It wasn't until he heard the click of the lock that he realized why she'd locked it and the very thought of such a thing made the tugging in his brain turn into a sharp, stabbing pain.

"Sheldon," she punctuated the word with the slam of a juice glass against the island causing a crack to run up its side. Grunting, she stepped in front of him to throw it away and took another down from the cabinet.

"Sheldon," the glass was set down with less force but the word was not diminished in any way, "I told you last night. I am not making love with you. Insisting upon it is the opposite of making love."

"Then consider it copulation. Coitus. For science."

"Which is exactly why I won't do it." She opened the refrigerator and got out the orange juice. She looked over at him. "Why now? You've spent weeks wrapped up in your work, basically ig -" her voice cracked slightly - "ignoring me, and now all you want is to get under my skirt. Surely you can see how that might spoil the mood."

"I've not been ignoring you." He put his hand up to his forehead to rub away the tugging. "Maybe you've been playing hard to get. What would put you in the mood? Candles? Some jazz? Brandy? Should I dress up and dance the flamenco? I know how now."

"For Hera's sake, you're ridiculous!"

"There's nothing ridiculous about science. I tried to tell you last night, I saw it all, in other universes. I think my spot - or maybe this line of apartments or even the whole building - it's a quantum fissure. Like in that _Star Trek_ episode, Parallels. And there are other children in the other realities."

Amy took a drink and then a deep breath. "Quantum fissure? Despite what _Star Trek _says, you can't just put the word quantum in front of another word and pretend it's real science."

"It is real!" Sheldon paused. He needed to remain calm and logical. Yelling and insisting had been his mistake last night. Which was strange, because he saw it all as he walked toward the bedroom, all the possible fallouts, but he never expected the naked, alone, and shivering one would come true. He reminded himself that Amy, for all her wisdom and other powers, wasn't as intelligent as him. In the past, yes, but not now. Yet she was frustrating his newfound, Sheldon-made luck. She was the only factor he could not see ahead of time, a set value he could not assume.

"A quantum fissure is a fixed point across the space-time continuum. A keyhole which intersects many other quantum realities. It's only been posited by string theory up until now, but last night I discovered it's true."

"Because you think you saw other children in our living room?"

"They were our children. And I know they are real, somewhere. So we can have more in this reality, too. Not just Hector. I thought you'd be thrilled to procreate with me again."

Something seemed to cause Amy's shoulders to soften. "You know I'd like more children eventually, Sheldon. But that's not how it works. The prophecy says -"

"I think the prophecy is wrong." He took a step toward her, the new hush in her voice giving him hope his calmer advance would work. He pushed away the version of himself he saw standing in the hallway, naked and knocking on Leonard and Penny's door. "We can use science to prove it. We can do it now, don't you see? And that's why we need to conceive another child. Because now is the right time."

"Why now, Sheldon, why? You're - you're not well."

"But I am. Don't you see? I've never been better than I am at this moment."

"Just a few days ago you agreed with me, you thought you were ill, too. Don't you remember? Agreeing to go to my lab, agreeing to tests to determine what was wrong?" The visible pain on Amy's face caused a strand of tugging in his mind.

"Of course I remember. But I was misguided and confused. I thought it was an illness, but now I realize it was just growing pains."

"Growing pains?"

"Don't you see? I've evolved. I may still be evolving. I'm not a puny homo sapien anymore, Amy, I'm the next level of humankind. I'm a homo novus now."

"You've evolved?" Amy asked, her mouth slightly open.

"Yes! Which is why we should create a child now. With your super strength and super speed and my super intelligence, we can create a whole new species, maybe a whole new genus. Clearly, the combination of our updated DNA would be exceptional."

"No." It was a mere whisper, and the silent terror in her green eyes caused another pulse in his forehead, stronger and more painful.

"It won't be like that," he tried to soothe, pushing away the images of thousands of brown-haired humanoids marching in formation, pushing away the pounding in his forehead. "We'll raise them to be benign overlords."

"Never."

A reality opened to him, a crack in the quantum fissure, and he saw Amy trapped and cowering, trying to block streams of crackling electricity from striking her, her bracelets useless even crossed in front of her face, her fingers clawing and scratching at the air in torment and agony.

"Ahhhhh!" Sheldon crouched down, the blanket falling from his naked hips, as he tried to squeeze his head. It wasn't a tug or a drag or a pull, it was a ripping. Something was trying to tear the front of his brain from the rest.

"Sheldon? Sheldon!" Amy's voice called from the distance, one terror replaced with another, and the sound of her distress for him only worsened the pain. Everything went black just as he felt Amy catch him.

* * *

"Forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight." Amy sat the last of the silver blister packs down on the table. "Exactly what you got."

"Perfect," Dr. Hernandez said. "I know it seems silly, but technically it's a legal requirement that you count them aloud in front of your partner. Then, after both parties have counted the same number of pills aloud, you have to log the remaining doses of Valium in this binder for your controlled substances. You each write, in your own hand, the number of pills you counted and then you each sign -"

_Flippp, flippp, flippp, snaffff._

One of the individually sealed Valium tablets fluttered to the floor as Amy shifted her arm to look at the logbook. "Sorry!" she said.

"It's okay. But that's why I said it's a good idea to count them directly back into the lockbox so that none of them fall off the table," Dr. Hernandez. "They're so small, it can happen all the time if you're not careful."

"Well, now I definitely won't forget," Amy said as she leaned over, putting her hand on the seat of the chair for balance as she reached for the small square pack . . . and rolled the chair directly over it. "Oh!"

Reaching down, she picked up the crushed package and held it out in front of her. "I think it's pulverized."

Dr. Hernandez reached for the pack and studied the clear side. "It is! That must be one heavy chair to completely crush a tablet like that."

"We have to mark it as destroyed and unusable, right? I mean, what can we do with a crushed Valium? I read that in the paperwork you gave me. I'm so sorry."

Her friend and colleague shrugged. "Plenty of more Valium where that came from. Maybe it's a good thing; I can show you how to document the loss correctly. Then we can toss it in the medical waste incinerator."

"Sure. I'll do that when we finish," Amy said, slipping the silver pack into her lab coat pocket.

* * *

"Here, I made you some tea."

Sheldon opened his eyes to find Amy standing before him. So that was the distracting noises from the kitchen had been. She looked concerned. She always looked concerned now, especially since he'd collapsed. A causatum he'd never seen coming. Somehow Amy was still able to blindside him.

"It's been four days since I collapsed. I recovered within seconds. You do not need to cluck around me like a mother hen."

"Someone does. You're not drinking enough. All you do is sit on the sofa and think."

"I do my best thinking in my spot. Increased fluid intake only leads to an increased need to urinate, which requires me to leave my spot."

Amy pushed the mug closer to him. "The loss of electrolytes and sodium from dehydration can cause changes in memory and attention and eventual seizures and permanent brain damage. I bet that would adversely affect your thinking, too."

"Just because you're a neurobiologist, you do not need to remind me of the effects of dehydration on the brain. I am aware. I would also be aware if it was occurring to me."

"Really? Because your lips look like sandpaper. Drink it."

Sheldon reached for the mug if only to stop the conversation. It, too, was adversely affecting his thinking. Amy had done it again: she'd proven herself the unpredictable outlier in the new quantum reality he was trying to forge. And he couldn't risk whatever it was that had caused him to pass out previously. He took a drink.

"Uggghh!" He pushed it away from him. "It's sweet!"

"I put honey in it. I know you normally don't like that, but you need the calories. You're not eating, either. Did you know a decreased appetite is also a symptom of dehydration?"

"Of course I do. But why so much? The honey is all I can taste!"

"Calories, Sheldon, calories. Think of it as medicinal. A spoonful of sugar, you know."

"Fine," he grumbled, gulping the tea down, ignoring the way the taste set off frissons of light. He also tried to ignore Amy watching him so closely, making sure he drank it all.

* * *

Only after she landed from the last leap did she allow herself to shiver in the cool night air. Or perhaps it was a tremor at what she'd just done. Wonder Amy walked to the edge of the roof, just a few flights up from their apartment, and she put a foot upon the parapet. Pasadena spread out before her, a cacophony of bright lights and sounds even in the middle of the night. Somewhere out there, a crime was being committed. She could have stopped it, but she had a crime of her own to commit. A dishonesty she never thought she'd have to take.

It was done now. The scene was washed, the evidence had been taken away. She reached down to press the inside of her elbow, but her tiny wound had long since healed. So small had been her injury that she never even felt light-headed. Her victim - she shuddered again at the word - still slept. Only time would tell how he reacted.

But it was not over. Tonight was just another step, another march to the beat of a battle drum she did not want to follow.

* * *

This dream was especially vivid.

Recently, Sheldon's dreams had been barely discernible from his waking world; almost everything he had previously believed was impossible now seemed attainable with just enough thought. Everything was color, filled with sounds and tastes in combinations he'd never before experienced. Realities opened and closed around him. He thought about Dr. Strange and scoffed; how simple that man now seemed!

But this dream pulled him back, like a faint tugging on his arm. Amy was there, kneeling next to him as he lay on the sofa. She was holding a snake and Sheldon recoiled from its rattle.

"Shhhhh, shhhhh," Amy soothed. She was dressed like Wonder Amy. But hadn't she left?

The snake was blood red and it coiled around her forearm, over the top of her hand. It was so thin, such a narrow tube of thing, but it seemed to pulse before his eyes. She guided it toward him with another soothing sound. But when he looked down, he saw it had already bitten him in the crook of his elbow. He could feel the pressure of its venom pumping into his veins, cold and hot at the same time. He tilted his head back to scream, but he passed out before a sound escaped.

He awoke with a start and looked around. The living room was dark, but nothing was amiss. Only a silence so deep it tasted like freezer burnt ice cream. Amy must be gone. Had she ever really been there? He started to sit up, but his eyes swam and forced him back down. He was so very tired. That dream had scared him, made him feel funny. His muscles ached like he was ill. The inside of his elbow throbbed from the dream still, but when he touched it he felt nothing.

When he angled his head to look for a bite mark, a single red pinprick seemed to rise and float before his eyes like a vision before he passed out again.

* * *

Sheldon licked his lips and opened his eyes. Daylight. A faint clicking sound. It was gray, like cement. It tasted like cumin. He turned toward it. Amy was sitting at his desk, her back to him. MRI images were on the screen. She was working. Was it the weekend? Amy had been working from home lately, ever since that night of the dream. Sheldon had the sense she watching him, studying him. Well, she should. It was unlikely she'd ever bask in this level of greatness again.

His leg itched, and when he scratched it the rough skin rasped beneath his fingernails, even through his pants. The sound was bright yellow and tasted tart like lemons and smelled of citrus. Uncrossing his legs, he stretched then out in front of him. How long had he been thinking with his eyes closed, contemplating the universe? He licked his lips again. They were dry.

"I'm thirsty," he declared.

Amy rotated the chair to look at him. "I'll get you something. Do you want some food -"

She stopped talking and it took Sheldon a few seconds to understand why. The sound of the kitchen faucet alerted him (the sound was blue like water but tasted like pumpkin - sometimes they matched, sometimes they didn't). Sheldon watched as the glass was filled and then he brought it toward him, through the empty air in the room. It was so simple.

He was thirsty. He needed water. All he had to do was think about it and it happened. He brought the glass closer, but slowly to avoid spilling it. It was so easy. He didn't need his arms or his legs; his brain was strong enough to do it all now.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Amy stand up and take a hesitant step closer. She reached out toward the glass, but she was too far away to touch it. Her head tracked it as it crossed the room, her mouth agape. A tiny squeak escaped (bubble gum pink and roasted duck).

Sheldon put out his hand and the cool roundness of the glass settled there. His eyes flicked away from her. "No, thank you. I'll get it myself."

Amy turned and ran, slamming the apartment door behind her, the loud sound a burst of olive green and mushrooms.

* * *

Upon the roof, Amy shut the door behind her. She forgot to twirl. She was on the roof dressed as Dr. Fowler. It didn't matter; she knew from months of coming and going this way that she wouldn't be seen. No one used the roof, anymore; the last time had probably been Howard and Bernadette's wedding.

The roof had been an instinct; a place she knew was safe for secret activities. Not just for leaping to and from adventures; Wonder Amy had been sitting up here and studying for weeks. She'd twirl and leave, letting Sheldon think there had been a call for her services. There, in the forgotten shed next to the air conditioner units and under a tarp was her stash: her borrowed textbooks, the notebook she'd stolen from Sheldon in which to write her hypotheses and plots, even an old laptop he never used anymore. The WiFi signal was surprisingly strong up here. He was so distracted she didn't have to lie to him. The only time he noticed her anymore was when he tried to convince her to have another child with him.

She wasn't sure anywhere in the apartment was safe anymore; so the roof it was. Amy put a hand over her chest to still her racing heart. Telekinesis. That's what she'd seen, correct? Sheldon moved a glass across the room with his mind. She didn't want to believe it; maybe she'd wake up soon, and it would just be another nightmare in the long string of them that her life had become lately.

Telekinesis. It was easier to believe Sheldon's accounts of quantum-this and alternate-that were all hallucinations, just the next delusional step of his mental illness. But now she saw his evolution with her own eyes. He was becoming something else, something new. Amy wanted to believe it was all benign, just as Sheldon had said. Another superhero. But the fear crawling up the back of her neck and raising goosebumps along her arms told her otherwise.

There were the MRI images and the EEG printouts. It wasn't benign. Even if Sheldon wouldn't hurt another - and she tried to concentrate on that belief - he was harming himself. He wasn't just killing himself, he was killing their relationship. Soon, if not already, he would decide love was merely an unnecessary social construct for lesser minds.

Amy was losing the man she loved. He was slipping away. Everything she loved about him would be gone soon: his patience, his support, his care, his humanity. Maybe she'd already waited too long; perhaps when he stopped shaving, that should have been the final sign. She ripped open the shed and took out the laptop, snapping it in half over her knee in frustration. All her work, all her research, all Dr. Fowler's daytime science had proven useless. There was no medical solution, no hospital that could treat him. She shivered, even in her layers of clothing, remembering what she'd done to him even if it was for him, to prepare for this outcome.

Something else needed to be done. The final step to stopping him. To helping him. A darker answer, the one Wonder Amy had developed during her nights on the roof. The calculated risk she never wanted to take. And time was of the essence.

_To be continued . . ._

* * *

_ **Thank you in advance for your reviews!** _


	9. Chapter 9

She did not twirl. It seemed too frivolous for the battle ahead.

Instead, Amy removed her Dr. Fowler attire and folded it away in the room with the photocopier. She pulled on her star-covered skirt as though she was girding her loins. She strapped on the breastplate that would shield her vital organs and wished it could shield her metaphoric heart. She zipped her red leather boots up to her knees, reminding herself to take each step with conviction. She wrapped her wrists in gold bracelets, praying they would give her hands the strength to do what was necessary. Her tiara pressed against her forehead, a reminder of the vulnerability of the human brain. She coiled her lasso at her side, in the hope that, even at the last second, another truth could be found. She applied her bold red lipstick with precision, a cruel reminder of every lie she had to tell.

She buffed her sword, far less sharp than the piercing in her chest, and her shield, weighing for less than what was on her shoulders, before she hid them in a quickly accessible spot under a lab table, hoping she would not need them.

Then, well past sundown, she put on her long white coat. For the power of science.

For even here, even now, on this pivotal night, Wonder Amy would need science. Wonder Amy would need Dr. Fowler. It was Sheldon who had taught her that.

She picked up her phone and stared at her lock screen, the picture of a smiling Sheldon and Hector. A happy, carefree moment that felt a lifetime ago. Had her happiness been too great to last any longer than it had? A flare, a flame, a mere flash. Had it burned so brightly only to burn so briefly?

As she took a deep breath, Amy dialed and braced herself for the next lie she must tell. Of all her lies, the most essential.

One ring. She could not do this.

Two rings. She must do this.

Three rings. She was not strong enough.

Four rings. Her strength was within her.

"Hello?"

"Sheldon!" Her voice sounded too bright. "You sound far away."

"There was no need to get up to answer my phone."

"Oh. I see. Um, anyway, I think I have something you want to get up for." She forced a chuckle. "In more ways than one, if you know what I mean." There was no reply and she took another inhale. "I've changed my mind. I think you're right. I think we should have another baby."

"Excellent. Return home and we will place a pillow under your buttocks so that when I mount you it will result in increased -"

"No." Amy squeezed the image away and continued, "No, I meant - now. Here. In my lab."

"Why?"

"I'm dressed like Wonder Amy," she explained. "In my lab coat. I'll be Dr. Amazona and you'll be Professor Atom. That's your favorite. No one's here, it's late. We won't be disturbed."

"I fail to see the value of such frills in this situation. Conception is a purely scientific endeavor."

So maybe a sexual escapade wasn't the best lure. But all Sheldon wanted her for lately was her uterus and there was only one logical way to get there. If Sheldon wanted only scientific copulation, she could offer that.

"Okay. I thought - I thought maybe we could do it while you wear the EEG cap. Or we both could. An experiment, you see; think about the data we could collect."

The pause was probably only a second or two, but Amy held her breath and felt like she was drowning.

"Remember that Mary Roach book I read, _Bonk_?" she continued. "The one where she and her husband have, um, coitus in an MRI machine for science? But ours would be even better. What are the effects on the brain patterns of coitus between two super beings? We could write a paper about it."

"Very well. I see the validity of your suggestion. I will arrive shortly."

He hung up before she could reply. It was just as well, she didn't have the stomach for another false flirtation. She knew how long the walk from their apartment was. Just enough time to finish her preparations.

* * *

Something was different. Sheldon knew it immediately. Dark colors flashed and swirled around him and the air tasted like lemonade left too long in the sun to sour.

Wonder Amy. Dr. Fowler. Dr. Amazona, the sexy scientist. Even just Amy. They were unknowable quantities still, even with his enhanced powers. His legs ached from the walk. No, not an ache, something different, not like fatigue. But different. All his muscles felt strange. Another unknowable quantity.

She rested against a lab table, her booted legs stretched out in front of her, crossed at her ankles. Just as promised, she was dressed like one of their racier role-playing fantasies. Amy had even straightened her hair, apparently brushing out all the Wonder Amy curls to bring more Dr. Fowler into the mix. He liked it. But it also made him frown as it was a reminder that something wasn't right.

Sheldon tried to see all the outcomes, he tried to focus on visualizing the next few steps, but nothing came. Why not?

"Hello, Sheldon." Her voice was off. Normally Amy's sexy voice was the same candy-apple red color as her lipstick and tasted just as sweet. This voice was tinged with something else. A worm in the apple? No, something darker.

"Hello, Amy."

They stood staring at each other, Sheldon just inside her lab door, Amy leaning sultrily against a table. Neither of them made a move. Amy's non-movement was another unforeseen occurrence, and it made something inside Sheldon hum. And not what he thought would be when he accepted her invitation.

Then it occurred to him. Amy had some sort of plan for this evening, and this moment wasn't included. She hadn't plotted for this pseudo-standoff. What had she anticipated? A rush of passion? Frenzied copulation? It couldn't be, even though he saw caged energy coming off of her in orange waves. She had suggested wearing EEG caps and MRIs; that would require precision and skill. But he saw that too, though, the sharp aqua of a strategy.

He looked around the room, searching for clues. Amy's larger remodeled laboratory was not yet familiar to him. There was the door to the back room where the photocopier was. There was the large plate glass window to the MRI lab, but it was translucent and he couldn't see through it well -

The MRI. The words he accidentally overheard, an error with the microphone. The thought he'd almost immediately discounted as a phrase taken out of context, as something impossible.

"You're going to try to kill me." It wasn't a question.

She had an amazing poker face, he'd admit that. Probably from years of lying about where she was disappearing to at all times. But he knew her too well; he saw the flash in her eyes.

"Don't be ridiculous. Whatever gave you that idea?"

"Don't be coy. You forget I'm all-knowing, all-seeing now. You won't succeed." He could tell a calculated lie, too; there was something here he couldn't know, something he couldn't see. The outcome. But that gave him an idea. "There is only one possible outcome, only one way this will end. I've already seen it, Amy."

"Then I apologize for making you relive it."

With a battle cry, Amy came speeding toward him. She was a blur, as usual, so fast he didn't have time to step aside. But she also didn't send him careening hard against the wall as she normally would have. Instead, he only faltered backward; several steps, yes, but he remained upright in the face of her superior power.

The realization struck them both at the same time. Amy looked up, her palms still pressed against his chest. The shock was writ large over her face.

"That's right, Amy. I'm stronger now, too." He looked down and flexed his arm, an enlarged bicep rippling beneath his tee shirt. That's why his legs felt different when he walked here; it wasn't fatigue, it was strength. "I told you, everything is mind over matter. Apparently, all I needed was a reason to build muscle, from the inside out. My brain must have known what you were going to try to do to me."

He laughed; not his usual snorty, catchy laugh, the weak laugh of a weak human, but instead the deep laugh of a superhuman. A homo novus. That had to be why he didn't see the various outcomes for this night. It hadn't been a mere bluff when he told Amy he'd already knew what would happen. His brain, his subconscious, had already seen and filtered and counter-prepared for all possible scenarios. He only had to give in to his new power, to just do what came naturally. For all his actions were already the correct ones.

"I won't let you kill me," he said as he grasped her wrists, ice-cold from the bracelets, and pushed her away from him with all his might.

She didn't go far, but still, Amy screeched in surprise, a shrill sound that pulsed yellow and caused that pain again. Sheldon reached up to touch his forehead with a growl. Why was it returning now? It had happened periodically since he passed out in the kitchen, but it was never that severe again. Perhaps becoming highly emotional had something to do with it; he'd been arguing with Amy that morning. That's why he hadn't tried so hard to convince her to have coitus again; he brought it up to her, often, but he didn't let things get as heated as they previously had.

Up until this point, their words had been calm, and Sheldon wanted it to remain that way. If anything was said in anger, who knew how long he'd be passed out. And what Amy would do to him.

"I don't want to hurt you," he said, deciding to negotiate. "I'll let you leave. But you mustn't try to harm me, either. We'll go our separate ways. Two super forces in this world, without overlap."

"Without overlap? What about Hector?"

The pain came as a shock, a sharp unexpected stab. "It - can't - matter." Sheldon fought it, balling his hands into fists. "He is only half - mmmmhhhh - meta."

"Because he is half yours!" Amy yelled at him. "He is our son! You can throw me away, but not him!"

"Then why did you take him away?" Sheldon crouched down into his arms, fighting the pain. "Not to visit your mother."

"To save him from you. To protect him behind the veil. For when you became this!" she roared.

The lasso hit him with a blast of heat, and with it came all the truth Sheldon had ever known: kisses and caresses, laughter and listening, baby snuggles and coos.

"Noooo!" he screamed, trying to throw the lasso off of him and a chair went flying across the room instead. In a flash, Amy pulled her shield out from under a table, just in time to protect her, the chair bouncing off of it. But the attack surprised her, and her defensive rush had caused the lasso to fall from his skin.

Sheldon stood, the pain a constant buzz now. Surely he could work through it, surely his mind had prepared him to withstand its onslaught even as it prepared his muscles for this battle. He had seen the true outcome when the lasso touched him, a mixture of its power and his own: Amy would flee this world and retreat behind the veil of Themyscira with Hector, a place the world could not find them. Even with all his new superiorities, the veil remained impenetrable. He could not let her go. He had to stop her. They had to create a child - a new child, a superchild, a female of Amazonian blood to rule first Themyscira and then the world.

It was so simple now, even with the pain. He remained stationary and used his mind to knock over the lab table, pulling it across the room to block Amy's path. He shattered every piece of glass in the room, funneling the shards of beakers and flasks to rain down upon Amy as she lifted her shield above her head. She flung her lasso and he lit every Bunsen burner to ignite the tip, forcing Amy to pull it back at the last nanosecond. The pain grew and still he fought, moving more furniture and equipment, narrowing the path she could move.

"Your super speed is useless if there is nowhere to run," he pointed out.

As she roared and the building shook, Sheldon saw the flash of her sword in her other hand. When had she grabbed it? Not that it mattered. Still, she crouched down and attempted to leap over the remaining tables and desks, but Sheldon upended them, one after another like dominos until she slammed against the floor. While she was down and dazed, the power of his mind pulled her sword out of her grasp and pushed it to the farthest corner of the room.

The pain built in his head but he gritted his teeth, trying to ignore it to focus on his growing power. Was he strong enough to brawl with her, hand-to-hand, fist-to-fist? He wasn't sure. Trapping Amy was not the same as subduing her. Amy would never surrender without a fight. It wasn't her style in the smallest of circumstances, and he knew she would sacrifice herself for Hector and her homeworld if necessary.

Just as he predicted, Amy stood and took a run down the path he'd created, then she leapt sideways to run along the edge of the wall, over a bulletin board, sending papers fluttering to the floor and landing on top of him. Her hands were like vices on his arms as she pushed him down, and they wrestled on the floor. Sheldon fought as hard as he could with his newly discovered strength, but the pain grew and grew until he felt like the front of his brain was ripping free from the rest. Amy used it to gain the advantage.

Almost incapacitated by the pain, a crescendo reaching ever higher, Sheldon felt himself being dragged by his arm along the floor. He kicked his feet, trying to grab onto the slick linoleum of the lab, broken glass crunching beneath him. He used his mind to pull at the overturned furniture and it moved in response, but the pain seemed to blot out some of his force and he could only shift them around, causing Amy to zig-zag on her course but not much more. Her determination filled the air and he knew he'd have to do something else to get free.

His fingertips started to tingle and buzz. Sheldon pressed his thumb and forefinger together and a spark shot off. Blackness danced and shimmered along the edge of his vision. Everything tasted hot and blue and electric. Amy stopped dragging him, and he lifted his free hand in front of his face. They danced along the edge of his fingertips, bluish-white: lightning bolts, like a plasma ball, arcing from one digit to the next.

Entranced by this new capability and desperate to escape her, Sheldon reached out and touched her hand, the one holding onto his arm. Amy yelped in pain and the sound sent another surge of ripping through his head. The pain was so great that even when Amy's power momentarily relaxed, he could not take advantage of it. Instead, Amy re-hitched her grip with even more might, causing his shoulder to pop out of socket and he screamed at the flood of new agony.

Where was she taking him? Deeper into the lab.

The door hit his hip as she pulled him through. The MRI lab. Swinging his head, the pain subsiding slightly if he didn't fight her, he saw the EEG set up. Everything was set up, even the items on the crash cart were turned on and blinking. Almost as though Amy was expecting a test subject.

No. No. She was wrong; the outcome had not been pre-determined. Sheldon could see it and change it yet. Surely this new power in his fingertips could be useful.

He remembered the image that came to him that day: Amy cowering in pain and fear as thousands upon thousands of volts of electricity coursed through her body. Was that the ending he'd seen?

NO! screamed the front his brain, and Sheldon realized he was screaming along with it.

Amy grabbed him beneath his armpits and dragged him up onto his feet. Her lasso, looped back at her side, touched his waist, burning him even through his tee shirts. He gasped at its undeniable power. Sheldon attempted to twist away from it, but it was useless. He was pressed between her and a sharp ridge digging into the small of his back.

But Amy was crying. Her aura was one of deep purple, waves of misery and despair leaching out of her. Tears ran down her face, two long rivers, and she did nothing to stop them.

"Tell me I don't have to do this," she whispered. "Tell me it's over. That you can stop it."

The authority of the lasso stung him and another quantum fissure opened before his eyes. But this was the fissure of his past, the fissure of his love for Amy. It burst from the front of his head and filled him.

"It's - my - orbito - frontal - cortex," he stammered. He was thinking of her, of Amy, always of Amy. It was fighting him, it had been all along, trying to hold him back, trying to prevent the worst things he could have done to her. The truth was there and it was exactly as predicted: stark black and white, a sharp delineation of the choices. There was only one way this could end. There was only one way to save Amy from him and what he had become, what he would become.

"Please -" he croaked. "You - have - to."

"But I love you."

"Please - finish - it - because - I - love - you - too."

Amy pushed him back, over that ridge, and he fell into the water. The movement had pushed the lasso away and it stopped pressing into his side. In its absence, everything came rushing back at him, just like the water of the industrial sink she was using: the anger, the strength, the knowledge. The world was a whirlwind of psychedelic colors and thoughts, so many thoughts, tumbling and falling and tripping over each other in his mind.

Without the lasso to stop him, the new force in him exerted itself, and his brain screamed, helpless to stop it.

Without the lasso to bring everything important into focus, he no longer wanted to stop it. Sheldon was a new metahuman and he was going to fight to the end. Wonder Amy was not going to defeat him and his evolution. Only able to move one arm, he put his hand in the water, trying to push Amy away from where she held him down, pushing against her palms on his chest. But she wouldn't budge. His lungs burned but he refused to open his mouth. He refused to let her take this new power from him. The water stung his eyes as he watched her above, wavy and distorted.

At first, it felt like his skin was boiling and then he realized the water around him was, too. He thrashed and fought and tried to push her away with his mind. But she was too strong. His orbitofrontal cortex was too strong. The water was too strong and the need to breathe was too strong, and Sheldon opened his mouth to scream. Water so hot it was lava poured down his throat and into his lungs and he flailed and jerked even harder.

"Amy!" he screamed into the bubbles, and he no longer knew which part of his brain said it. Was it a warning, a threat, a plea? He could no longer see her through the roiling water but he gave in to her.

She was vivid red and dark blue and light gold. She was bright like the stars and dark like a secret. She tasted of salty sea and bitter ash. She smelled strong like confidence and faint like paper. She sounded like the rush of a thunderstorm and the gentle hush of a mother's song. She felt like iron and wool. She was contradictions and coincidences, she was the riddle and the solution.

A peace came over him and the pain and the noise stopped. For just a second he saw another future, one last possible outcome: there was a kiss upon his forehead and she pulled back with a smile. She stepped away, but then Amy looked over her shoulder and winked at him.

Then, even as he watched her eyelashes descend behind her glasses and fan over her cheek, he felt it all slipping away. The last sound he heard, the last memory he would never make, the last imprint on a life that was ending, was his wife sobbing from above the water.

"I love you."

After that, the water took him with a darkness so vast it could only be the oblivion of death.

_To be continued . . ._

* * *

_ **Have faith in me.** _

_ **And thank you in advance for your reviews!** _


	11. Chapter 11

The breeze picked up and the soft linen curtain fanned inward, tickling Sheldon's face. He reached up to pull it away, causing bright sunlight to stream in. He glanced out beyond it. The sky was the brightest shade of blue, checkered with fluffy white clouds and a dark V of birds. Below him, the island stretched out, the white stone buildings close and then rolling green meadows and dark forests. Beyond that, where he could not see, the cliffs dropped off to the stretches of sandy beaches and turquoise waters that surrounded them. Just another day on Paradise Island.

The calm hum of daily tasks and the distant sounds of a few animals were a stark contrast to the few days he'd spent in the hospital. While there, he had no sense of time. Just the ebbing and the flowing of darkness. The darkness was cold and empty but it was a sweet relief from the light, pulling him upwards into tides of excruciating pain. With the pain came an awareness of noise, endless beeps and hums from monitors and the hissing of oxygen through his mouth. Yes, the colors and scents and tastes were gone, but he barely noticed the pain was so great. Amid the pain, he wanted to open his eyes, see what was happening, but his eyelids seemed to be forced shut. In fact, his entire head seemed to be wrapped in something. He wanted to talk and answer the distant babbling, but there was something down his throat.

Slowly, though, he became aware that the pain was lessening. His skin tingled and itched. He was healing. Others noticed. The babbles sharpened into speech he could understand. Words made it through like "impossible" and "miraculous." He tried to moan or stir or find a way to tell them he was not asleep, but every time he did he felt Amy's hand in his, squeezing it hard. She only stopped squeezing when he stopped trying.

Once, Amy's voice cut through the noise to tell him to be still, they were removing the bandages from his eyes. Even with his eyelids shut, suddenly the world was bright pink, the tiny vessels of his eyelids dancing in view. He squinted on reflex, but then he let his eyelids slowly flutter open as he adjusted to the light. She was sitting on his bed, her face anxious and drawn, and she mouthed, "Shut your eyes."

Confused, he did, and then, when the sounds of others had emptied, Amy whispered, "It's working. I knew it would. I gave you what you needed. Let me save you, Sheldon. Don't wake up; they'll only ask you questions. Just go to sleep and let it work."

The blackness was replaced by nonsensical dreams. He let himself sleep and he kept his eyes closed in between, as Amy instructed. When a long stretch of time passed without voices, and his eyelids told him it was night, he dared to peek them open to see if the room was empty. It was, other than Amy sleeping, sitting in the chair next to the bed, but her arms and head resting on the edge of his mattress. He reached down to shake her with a hand that did not look like his own: it was dark pink and leathery in texture, with white scars crisscrossing his skin in a rope-like pattern. When she awoke, he pointed at his throat.

She must have understood, because later, when sunlight was again beyond his closed eyes, they came to remove the ventilator. He opened his eyelids so they knew he was awake, and he blew out, past the pain, as instructed. The first breath entirely on his own hurt, too, like inhaling sandpaper, and he coughed and coughed until they let him sip some water. Amy sat on the edge of his bed and held his hand. He reached for her, and one of the nurses said, "Your shoulder! Don't move it!"

It was too late as he'd already pulled his arm free of the sling with a grimace. Amy leaned into his palms as he cupped her face and gladly fell forward at his bidding. He felt her tears between their cheeks.

"Take me out of here," he whispered in her ear, each word another knife. "Please. Take me somewhere quiet. Where I don't have to think anymore."

"I will," she whispered back, "even if I have to fight every one of these people to let you go."

It wasn't so much fighting as it was checking him out of the hospital over the protests of his doctors. Regardless, Amy brought him here, to Themyscira, as the quietest and most peaceful place she knew. A place to rejuvenate and heal. At first, the still was strange. He'd become so accustomed to the pounding and crashing of ideas in his head. Here, in these sun-dappled days, Sheldon tried to relax back into the man - the husband and father - he knew he was. But he also feared to be alone with himself. He actively shunned all thoughts of math and science and instead started to read the books from Amy's childhood library. Fiction classics, ripping yarns like _Robinson Crusoe _and gentle tales like _The Secret Garden_; anything to engage him, to occupy his mind with a fantasy that wasn't of his own frenetic creation. He read stories with only one possible outcome, a conclusion written long ago, something with a known ending. But _Frankenstein_ and _The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde _\- he left those mad scientists on the shelf.

It was only after he heard a burst of laughter from somewhere in the palace that Sheldon realized what he was doing. Daydreaming. His fingers curled around the book in his hands.

This was the first time he'd allowed his mind to wander by itself. And nothing untoward happened. No delusions of grandeur. No complicated mental Ruth Goldbergs.

"Smile!"

Sheldon turned to see Amy standing at the entrance to the terrace. She held up her phone and snapped a photo of him. "I'll go down later to the computer lab and send it to Leonard and Penny. To show them how well you're healing," she said as she approached.

"Do you really think all my friends will believe you took me to your mother's mansion in Greece to recuperate? Maybe you shouldn't send it. I mean, look at the size of this daybed; it's a boat."

Amy shrugged. She wore her hair down in dark curls and the long white sleeveless sundress she had been married in. "My experience is that people's brains tend to take the path of least resistance. The simplest solution is the easiest to digest. So, yes, they fully believe my mother comes from old Grecian money. Also, it's not untrue."

Her simple brown sandals slid off as she crawled into the large daybed and curled up next to him. He reached to encircle her with his arm.

"Maybe," Sheldon murmured. She was probably correct. After all, isn't that what had happened to him? Hadn't his brain taken the path of least resistance when it should have stood its ground and fought? Instead, only one small part had. The part that belonged to Amy. But that was too painful to contemplate on this beautiful afternoon. "Hector is down for his nap?"

"He was out like a light. I guess taking your first steps is exhausting."

"I'm just glad we didn't miss it." Left unsaid was that he almost did. One of the most important milestones in his son's life.

"Me, too," Amy said. She reached for the book in his hands, and he let her take it. "_The Count of Monte Cristo_? A man imprisoned on an island he will do anything to escape, no matter the costs? I'll try not to read too much into that."

"He was wrongly imprisoned. But I have earned my days here."

"Sheldon, don't say that." Amy twisted in his arms to look up at him. "I won't say much, but you must know that you didn't do anything wrong and -"

"It's okay," he interrupted her. "I'm ready to talk about it now."

"Are you sure?" Her voice wobbled.

All week they'd avoided it. Sheldon healed and Amy helped him the only way she knew how. He let her feed him chilled soups for his raspy throat and massage his shoulder. She lifted Hector for him so he didn't have to strain his just-healed ribs. It was she who brought the first books to him, and he understood now why she liked to read her silly cozy mysteries between her escapades. It was she who tried to even out his hair, now that some tuffs were long and some of the barest fuzz was growing back. The result was nothing short of comical, but it felt good to laugh with her about it. And it was she who took him to his first bath, who entered the pool ahead of him, without letting go of his hand. It was she who did not mention his trembling legs or shallow breathing. And, when the thought of dunking his head beneath the water was too great, it was Amy who wordlessly washed that uneven hair for him using an ancient bejeweled cup. Instead of a spoken word of gratitude, he repaid her silent acts by not letting her know he saw her wiping the tears from her face when she turned away.

These small acts of aid, after the battle had been won, after the terror had been abated, after the foe had been vanquished, where acts he understood well. All the nights he waited up for Wonder Amy, pacing, only to wrap her wounds and bathe the world off of her and hold her while she fell into a dreamless sleep just to have something to do, some way to keep busy and feel useful. They were the only ways he knew to show his form of strength to her, regretting his mere human body could no more. Now she was doing the same but for slightly different reasons; Amy was making her penitence in these tiny gestures. They were the tangible gifts of love, and, even when he didn't want the foul-smelling hot mud spread over his face and hands to help prevent scarring, he let Amy do it. For the ministrations were not for him alone; he knew each small act was healing her heart, too.

A week was spent avoiding this conversation; Sheldon was not just frightened of what power the memories might hold over him, but even more of what Amy would say. But he felt at peace this afternoon, with his bride, in her bridal gown no less, at his side. "I think it's time, don't you? You probably want answers and I know I do."

Amy sat up straighter, pulling away from his so that she could face him. At first, she just stared at him, and he knew how she felt. "I don't know where to start, either," he offered. "So you first."

It took her longer to rearrange than it should have; she seemed to be buying time as she sat cross-legged on the daybed opposite him. She curled her hands into her lap, and he was struck at how small and fragile they looked.

At last, she took a deep breath. "I didn't want to. You need to know that. It was a last resort. Even at the very last moment, I would have stopped if I could. But I had to. Your brain was overloading. It was overworking, like a cascade failure. Your entire brain lit up on the functional MRI, every part of it working at full speed at all times. Eventually, that alone would have killed you, even if - even if you didn't become . . ." She didn't finish the sentence. "I had to control the outcome for you to live."

"You never told me."

"You never asked. You just became more and more . . . well, you know."

Sheldon's eyebrows dipped. Amy was correct. "I just woke up the day after we ran those tests and I thought I was better," he said, more thinking aloud than explaining what she already seemed to know. "Before that, I was worried, I knew something was wrong, but then, after, I thought the changes were only positive."

"Was it the Valium? Because after I gave you the second one, that's when you started displaying telekinesis. Maybe sedation led to leaps in the process somehow."

"The second one?" Sheldon asked. "A second Valium?"

"It's how I saved you. It's how you lived. Sheldon, you were dead for at least fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty."

He wanted to shake his head and tell her that was impossible. But, instead, Sheldon ran his hand over his face. His skin was smooth again. The same creamy white he'd always known. Even in the mirror, the last of the white scars had disappeared. He rotated his shoulder without a single hint of pain. He protested, more of a reflex than a belief, "But it was only a minute or two. There was nothing, just darkness, and then a light."

"I didn't believe it, either, when it happened to me. It wasn't until I found the comic book at Stuart's store about the plane crash that I knew."

"What?"

"The plane crash not long after we met. When I - I couldn't save all those children and I drowned in the ocean. I thought I was only underwater for a minute or two, also, but then I saw the comic book and Stuart told me that I was underwater for at least an hour. It seemed like I really drowned and lived. There had to be something about me because I'm a demi-goddess. So I did research. Not just about medical ways to cure you - I worked tirelessly on that, you have to know that - but also secret research. For my secret plan. Well, plans. I tried to find a way to give up my powers to save you. Or share them. If I gave you my powers, would that make you a superhero, a force for good? Or even just human again."

Sheldon swallowed away the lump that had formed in his throat. "You would have done that? You would have become human, for me?"

"Yes. But I couldn't find a way, there wasn't enough time. Maybe it's impossible." Amy shook her head. "I never wanted to do it, to hurt you, Sheldon. I hoped to find another way, anything at all, but - but . . ."

"I left you with no choice."

Amy looked down and seemed to brush something out of her eye. "I knew it was still you, that you wouldn't hurt me. But I worried. I didn't know how long it would last; your powers were growing, you were getting colder, more distant, like you were being overshadowed. Sheldon, when I killed you, it was like killing myself. That's how much it hurt - No. It hurt more than that. I would have killed myself instead if that had been the answer."

He believed her. Sheldon had heard the anguish in her voice when he died, he'd seen the tears on her cheeks when she begged him to tell her she didn't have to it. Mostly, though, he believed her because he felt that way every single time she came home injured. That he would give his own life to help her avoid even the smallest of bruises.

"I know that, Amy." His hand sought hers upon her lap, and he wrapped his palm around it. To protect her. "I'm not blaming you. I just don't understand what happened; that's what I want to know. Tell me how you did it. Explain the science to me."

As she wiped her face again, Amy seemed to gather herself. "I purposely crushed a Valium during a controlled substance count and pretended it was an accident. Then I never took it to be destroyed. Instead, I put it in your tea. I knew it would knock you out; just the half-dose we gave you for the MRI made you sleep for hours and hours."

"The honey," Sheldon said, sitting up straighter as he recalled the overly sweet tea Amy insisted he drink.

"Yes. And, then when you were out, I took out other supplies I'd been stealing, one by one, from the lab, and hiding on the roof -"

"The roof?"

"There's an old maintenance shed up there no one uses anymore. I broke the lock. I would dress like Wonder Amy in case you ever asked where I was going. Anyway, that night, I got the supplies and I gave you my blood. You only stirred once, but you were groggy. I was able to get you back to sleep. By then, you were sleeping on the sofa when you even bothered to sleep anyway -"

"- because you locked the bedroom door," Sheldon reminded her. It was said not with recrimination, but rather with remorse. Amy said she knew he wouldn't hurt her, but a part of her was frightened of him and what he might do. The very thought of it, the way he tried to convince her to have coitus, how it caused her to start locking herself away, it sickened him.

"Yes. Then, when it was over, I took everything away, all the evidence, back to Caltech and I burned it in the biohazard incinerator."

"I thought it was all a dream. I thought it was a snake. I'd been having such weird dreams, I just brushed it off as another." He paused. "How did you know it worked?"

Amy shrugged. "I wasn't sure. I couldn't ask you how you felt. But your appetite increased, that was a good sign. And I noticed you started to, well, bulk up, even before you did."

Sheldon dropped her hand to pull up his white tee shirt and ran his palm over his abdomen. Gone was the pale flabbiness of a few weeks ago; instead, there were the defined muscles of a much stronger man. Even after the scars faded, there were parts of his body that felt foreign.

"How long will it last?" he asked.

She chuckled and it pleased him. "I don't know. My educated guess is a hundred and twenty days to fully wear off."

"Because that's how long it takes a human body to completely remake all its red blood cells?"

"Yes. But it could be tomorrow or never It's not like there's a precedent." Amy took his hand back and he looked back up at her. "You know the muscles don't matter to me?"

"I know." He let his shirt fall. "Maybe it's academic since the goal was to kill me anyway, but how did you know a straight blood transfusion like that wouldn't kill me? It's very risky."

"The goal was _not_ to kill you," Amy said with force. "The goal was to save you. I had hope, even at that late stage, that my blood alone would heal your brain. But then I saw it didn't, and I had to give in to my last resort. I had to deprive your brain of oxygen for long enough that it could be . . . restarted, as it were."

"Why drowning?" Sheldon asked. "I mean, you're lucky I already hate to swim."

"Several reasons." She held up her hand to tick them off for him. "Drowning leads to hypoxia of the human brain in six minutes. A known quantity. Carbon monoxide poisoning, for example, takes much longer and it's not always the same amount of time for every person. And it had to be something localized to you; that much carbon monoxide probably would have incapacitated me, as well. And drowning was the one thing I knew I had survived, so it followed you might, too. I also chose it because drowning doesn't usually otherwise injure the head or the brain. I didn't know, I didn't expect . . ."

"Go on," he urged, hearing the sadness creep back into her voice. "The science, the facts. How did you know your blood would work?"

"I didn't, not really. But it was my best hypothesis. It was a calculated risk I knew I had to take. Here, on this island, we can be injured or even die from an accident. Even me. You know that. But we've never been ill. I've never had a cold, even when I leave this place. I always thought it was just another magical gift from the gods when they gave us the veil to shield us from the world."

"Is that why your brought me here? Do you think the veil is working on your blood in my body, healing me even faster?" Sheldon considered how much more at peace he found himself on the island than all the other times he had visited before. "Because I am part of this island now? At least temporarily?"

Amy shrugged. "I brought you here because it is quiet, as you asked, and safe from prying eyes. You were already drawing too much attention at the hospital with your rapid recovery anyway. But, maybe. I hope so."

Sheldon squeezed her hand. "Thank you. But I interrupted you. Go on. About your blood."

"Well, as I said, I knew there was something even more different about me. I have always been stronger than everyone else here, for example. I took a hematology class at Harvard, and we had to perform the testing on our own blood for blood typing. I did mine three separate times. I always got O, but it was never right. I had no antigens and no Rhesus factor but the antibodies were all positive, every single one of them. It was impossibly pure."

"Because you're not human," Sheldon said.

"I knew what it meant. I took an incomplete on the assignment rather than let it be known, even to a college professor. No one can know."

The implications made him shudder. Amy could save the world, but only by bleeding herself dry. She would be hunted down, studied, tortured. Yes, he would gladly end his own life to prevent that.

"So you lured me to your lab, we fought, you drowned me, and then you resuscitated me, thereby restarting my brain?"

"Yes. Well, I had help. My hands, your face, I hadn't anticipated the burns. I'd almost given up. But then Dr. Hernandez showed up and she helped."

Sheldon stirred, alarmed at the name of a person he didn't expect. "So she knows? Can you trust her?"

"I already do. I had to. But, yes, I trust her." Amy took a deep breath. "I didn't plan on all this. I thought I'd revive you and we could go home. Maybe you'd need a little supplemental oxygen that we keep in the lab, that's it. I didn't think we'd end up at the hospital and . . . here. I know my home bores you."

"No." Sheldon looked out at the perfect world once more. "Not this time. I needed peace. Quiet. Some distraction that wasn't math. I want to be alone, with you. I didn't want to think, at least my own thoughts."

"Do you - do you remember it all?" Amy asked, and Sheldon knew it was time to tell his half of the story.

"In a way," Sheldon explained. "It was like super synesthesia. It just kept getting stronger and more complex. Every sound had a taste and every taste had a color and every color had a smell. So I remember things that can't possibly be."

"But you already have synesthesia."

"Sometimes, with some things. Not all the time, not like that. It was overwhelming. And yet, at the time, I liked it."

Amy placed her hand on his leg. "Do you miss it?"

"No. Well, except I would like to instantly know if I made a mistake because of the black and the sound. That might be useful."

Amy smiled softly.

He continued, "Also, I seemed to have no sense of time. The math, the science, all those equations . . . it's like a dream." He shook his head as he considered discussing the alternate versions of themselves he saw, the ones he believed confirmed his theories about string theory. Now, in the soft light of Amy's radiance, it seems too irrational to be true. Maybe some other day. "Remember when we stopped at home before we came here? Long enough to pack a bag?" Amy nodded. "I looked at my notebooks, just the ones lying on the desk. They were rubbish, Amy. Most of it's unreadable and even when it's legible, none of it adds up. I thought I cured cancer, but I didn't."

She squeezed his thigh. He realized she'd bee; creeping ever closer on the daybed, as their words pulled them back together. "Maybe later, after some time, you can go through them again. Maybe your early notebooks are more rational, before it - whatever it was - was so advanced -"

"I want to burn them all," he interrupted. "Will you help me? Please?"

Amy lowered her eyes but then she nodded. "Of course."

"I was so foolish, so cocky. But in my memories, I only remember being so confident. I remember thinking I was evolving, I was better, I was smarter . . ." He shook his head again. "Except when your lasso touched me."

"My lasso?"

"The truth," Sheldon explained. "It's like it cut through all the noise. Amy, I - I was going to kill you. In the lab, when I realized you were going to kill me, I was trying to do the same to you. I didn't want to give up my powers, I didn't want to give up the - the creature I'd become. It's why I don't blame you for what you did. I don't how you can forgive me for that."

"No, you weren't."

He tilted his head. "What do you mean?"

"Even at the very end, at your worst, you never actually harmed me unless I attacked you first. You couldn't. That's how I knew you were still the man I loved. Something was stopping you, something was holding you back. It's why you couldn't kill me. I knew you never left. I knew you couldn't do it, your love wouldn't let you. It's how I knew you, the real you, could come back to me."

"I'm not sure I deserve that much faith."

"Well, then I certainly don't. Because I'm the one who actually did kill you. There's not a Hallmark card for this situation."

Something about it struck Sheldon as funny and he smiled. At first, Amy looked surprised but then she smiled back. She reached out and picked up his book, lying forgotten between them, and her forefinger stroked the cover. "In this book, the goal of Edmond Dantès is to return to the mainland and to punish the man who treated him wrongly, to exact revenge for what he has suffered." She looked back at him, her green eyes bright and determined behind her glasses. "Do you know who he is, Sheldon?"

His heartbeat excelled, and he reached up to touch his bicep almost as a reflex. "I - I think so."

"Me, too. But how?"

"He gave me some tea to drink - not nearly as sweet as your Valium-laced concoction; that could have been it." Then Sheldon shook his head. "But I don't think so. I think it was when he slapped me on the arm. It surprised me, since, well, he looks like a Hobbit, but he said he was strong from playing football. I brushed it off as a brag, maybe even a lie; I mean, he looks like he played, what, ten seconds at most? But my arm was sore afterward, more than it should have been."

"Dr. Pemberton," Amy supplied.

"Dr. Pemberton," Sheldon confirmed with a nod. "I just wish I understood why."

"When you're fully recovered, when you're ready, we'll go back and confront him. Lasso him up and get a confession."

"No!" Amy looked sharply at his outburst. "I mean, I can't. I'm weak now, Amy. I've fought too much. It's not something I want to do again. I don't how you do this several times a week."

"Well, to be fair, my battles are not usually so dramatic. But there are times I feel as you do now. You don't have to fight; I will do it alone."

"I don't want you fighting my battles for me, either, Amy -"

"It's fine. It should be me. This whole thing is my fault," she interrupted.

Sheldon wrinkled his brow. "Your fault? How?"

"If I hadn't interfered in the stupid Quidditch match, if I hadn't I tried to make up to you by taking you to Stark in the first place." She set her lips in straight, firm line. "It must be done, so I will do it alone."

As he waved his hand to dismiss the idea, he said, "No, the Quidditch match had nothing to do with this. That's not what I meant. I mean that I hate hiding behind you. I'm the worst kind of human. Not only is my body weak, but my brain is, too. I always thought my IQ would bring me fame and happiness. But even my supposed genius is worthless if it lets a man as feeble-minded as Pemberton overtake it. I even believed in telekinesis; do you have any idea how many laws of physics that would violate if it were possible?"

"He didn't brainwash you, Sheldon. He must have given you something, an injection or infusion of some sort. You had actual physical changes in your brain and its functionally. The EEG and the MRI proved it. I saw the telekinesis and the electrokinesis with my own eyes. It was not your imagination. That significant and drastic of a change in neural activity would have killed a weaker man."

"But what if I'm not worthy of you? What if all he's left behind is a coward?"

"Sheldon Cooper," Amy leaned forward and grabbed his shoulders, "you are _not _a coward. A coward does not live the life you have chosen. A coward would not bind my wounds and tell my lies. It is not easy to be my mate. My source of strength. Every time I am lacking or depleted, you fill me back up. Your strength comes from here - " she poked him in his chest "- and I would pit your heart against my muscles and Pemberton's brain any day."

"You always say that, about my heart, but the human heart is merely a muscle," Sheldon argued, and he felt the weight and the sadness creeping back. "Mine is probably as weak as the rest of my muscles without your blood to help."

"Alright. Let's be literal, then." She pressed her forehead against his. "This is your orbitofrontal cortex. Where love lives in the brain. The only way I could calm your brain in the MRI was to tell you to think about me. Do you remember that? And everything else faded but this. And, at the end -" her voice cracked, and Sheldon saw the tears slip from her closed eyes - "you were in so much pain, and you begged me - you begged to do it because your orbitofrontal cortex was fighting. It was what was keeping you from killing me. Some people say there are things in this world that cannot be seen or measured and they are the things that truly matter, but that is not true. Because I can measure your orbitofrontal cortex, Sheldon, and I did. I kept a photo of it and sat it on my nightstand to look at to help me sleep. It is real and it is strong and brave and true. If you were a coward I would not have killed you, because you would not have had the strength to endure the darkness, the strength to find the light. Yes, my blood may have helped, but the light . . ." She opened her eyes, and Sheldon stared into them, so close to his, mesmerized by the force of her words. "The light was already within you, just as it had been with me at the bottom of the ocean. It's here, Sheldon, where your brain loves mine. And I won't let anyone take that from us."

The kiss came as a surprise, but he understood it. All that came after was a surprise too, but he welcomed it: the hot press of her flesh, the mid-day breeze on his bare skin. It wasn't about physical pleasure, but rather about being as close as they could. Mostly they cleaved to each other, Amy's legs wrapped about him as he kissed the tears from her face. They wouldn't move until he felt himself losing her, and then she would flex her strong internal muscles to harden him again, keeping him inside her. He did not expect it, but Amy squeezed and rolled him until he found his release and he let go of all he'd been holding, deep within her, even as his forehead never left hers.

_To be continued . . ._

* * *

_ **Thank you in advance for your reviews!** _


	12. Chapter 12

The night was still, and Sheldon snapped his head toward any sudden noise. He tried not to pace, as that would surely look suspicious to the security camera mounted just a few feet away. What was taking so long?

At last, though, Dr. Pemberton came bumbling toward the glass side door labeled Employee Entrance. He opened it with another of his easy smiles and admitted Sheldon.

"Dr. Cooper! You made it!"

The comment rankled. Why did he sound so surprised that a man of Sheldon's intelligence would not have been able to locate a clearly marked door at one of the largest buildings in the Hollywood hills?

"I was surprised you wanted to meet so late at night," Dr. Pemberton continued as they walked toward his laboratory. "The place is almost empty."

"I had to wait until Dr. Fowler was asleep."

"Oh?" Dr. Pemberton swiped his keycard through the pad next to his lab and opened the door for them. "Secrets from the missus, eh? Boy, do I know what that's like." He chuckled.

Sheldon looked around without comment. The lab was the same messy, disorganized place he remembered. How was it possible this goofy, folksy, scatterbrained man could be the source of Sheldon's recent ordeal? And yet he was. Not for the first time, Sheldon considered it more likely that Dr. Pemberton had just stumbled upon the formula of whatever it was he had given him to cause his mental changes. An accidental discovery, something Dr. Pemberton couldn't take credit for. And yet he had.

"What can I do for you?" Dr. Pemberton lifted a stack of papers off a stool and gestured to it. "I have to say, it was a huge surprise to get your email. The great Dr. Cooper wants to collaborate with me on a project? I'm honored."

As he took the seat, Sheldon explained his presence, "I'll get straight to the point. I know what you did to me. An injection or maybe even a hypospray of some sort - whatever it was, it changed my brain, the way it functions."

Pemberton had been bending over, cleaning off another stool for himself, but he stood up straighter. "Your lab accident wasn't an accident, was it?"

It wasn't a surprise he knew; in fact, Sheldon had counted upon it. Gossip traveled fast in the scientific circles, especially as Dr. Fowler was an adjunct to Stark now. It might have even been part of Pemberton's plan all along. "No, it wasn't. Wonder Amy and I fought because of my new powers. The powers you gave me, wasn't it?"

"I heard it was Dr. Fowler in the lab." Pemberton's usual casual speech patterns were replaced with a hard tone and his eyes sharpened along with it. "But then, that's an easy mistake to make, isn't it? Since they're one and the same."

Sheldon swallowed. There was no reason to hide it now. "Yes, they are. And that's why I'm here."

"Go on."

He stood, to put himself on even ground. And to fight the urge to frown. What he wanted first was a confession, an assurance that he was dealing with the correct man. His entire plan depended on it. "What I need to know, before I tell you what I had in mind, is where you stand. Other than right in front of me."

"You want to know why I did it?"

"Yes."

"I needed a test subject. Not many people come to my lab. I couldn't believe my fortune when it was you: the brilliant Dr. Cooper. Wonder Amy's . . . let's say boy toy. I wasn't certain she was Dr. Fowler yet, not until I heard about the lab accident. Dr. Fowler couldn't defeat you, but Wonder Amy . . ." he shrugged, "maybe. Anyway, you were the perfect trap."

"Trap?"

"A honey trap. For Wonder Amy. To rid the world of her once and for all."

"Why?" Single syllable replies seemed to be best option. Just prompts to keep him talking, to encourage him to tell the whole story.

"If I was right - thank you for proving that, by the way - my discovery could create a new legion of humans. Humans with powers to take on the gods and aliens. We only think we need them, but once I tapped into the full potential of humankind I could prove we don't. We can take back our planet for ourselves. Maybe some of the other superheroes, we could use them, turn them, make them do our bidding. But not Wonder Amy."

"She would never consent."

"Exactly. She'd too self-righteous, too merciful, always tying people up when she should kill them. She calls it wisdom or kindness, but it's actually naiveté. Weakness." Pemberton took a deep breath and picked up a football that was resting, for no apparent reason, on the closest table. He passed it back and forth between his two meaty hands. "So, tell me, Dr. Cooper, are you Wonder Amy's pawn or have you discovered the power to break free?"

He launched the football in a perfect spiral without warning, and Sheldon reached and caught it easily with a single hand as it whizzed past him.

"I am no one's pawn. Revenge is mine," Sheldon said.

Pemberton laughed, a deep, rolling laugh that made Sheldon's stomach tremble. "Not yours alone. Not even yours first."

The blue arc of electricity snapped from Pemberton's hands and reached out to the football, instantaneously setting it on fire. Sheldon yelped and dropped the ball, which only made the other physicist laugh harder. "That's right, Sheldon. Once I, too, was a weak man like you. A scientist without a breakthrough. I knew my discovery wouldn't kill you because it didn't kill me first."

The burning football rose in the air and Sheldon watched it as it floated directly in front of him. "Tell me why you're really here. And remember, I've had my powers longer. See this football? I could do the same to you without even concentrating."

"I want revenge on Wonder Amy - Dr. Fowler. She almost killed me; she believes she did. She thinks it was traumatic enough that I won't bother her anymore. She thinks she negated my new powers, but I've been pretending, holding them back where she can't see them. I told her I was weak and cowardly, I pretended to be contrite. I've come to you, so we can work together to defeat her."

"Why should I believe you?"

Sheldon picked up the wooden stool he'd been sitting on earlier and snapped it across his knee. "Look at my new strength. From your serum, no doubt. And yet she made a fool out of me. Everyone thinks I was stupid enough to get caught in a lab accident, a simple explosion. She refuses to share my vision - our vision. I tried to convince her to procreate with me, to help create the next evolution of humankind, but she refused."

"You could not force her with your new powers?"

His teeth clenched and Sheldon willed his jaw to relax. "I could not. She was still stronger than me. That's why I know it will take both of us to defeat her."

"She's your wife. The world may not know it, but I do," the other scientist pointed out. "Won't you feel guilty? How do I know you could stay the course, kill her if need be?"

As he reached up to rub his forehead, Sheldon replied, "I won't lie. There is a part of me - a very small part - that feels a little . . . bad about killing her. After all, as you say, once I thought I loved her. But I have learned to ignore it, to overpower it. It's inconsequential now. It cannot hold me back any longer. Whatever feelings I had for her, they died in her laboratory that night, along with the rest of me."

Pemberton stepped closer, and the last of the flames died out from the football, leaving only dark ash falling to the floor. "I was concerned when you disappeared for a week, no doubt letting Wonder Amy take you away. But I knew you'd see it my way. This is a break-through and we have to work together. If we present a united front, we have a much better shot at winning. I'm glad you're the type of man who understands the practicalities. I'm glad you're the type of man who would sell out his partner for reshaping the world. I know fame is your lifelong dream, and you may not get another chance like this."

"You're wrong." Sheldon stepped back as he said the words, clearing space for what he knew had to come. "Amy is the only lifelong dream I have, and she's also the only reason I deserve anything."

Just then, on cue, the door ripped off its hinges and Wonder Amy entered, a blur of blue and red and gold. Sheldon retreated to the corner of the room, out of the way, a promise he gladly made to Amy when they formulated their plan. One life or death struggle had been enough for him.

With the element of surprise on her side, Amy easily drove Pemberton to the floor. She reached for her lasso, the move she and Sheldon had agreed upon. Surely if the lasso worked on Sheldon, if the lasso put the errors of his path into clear focus, if it cut through the neural noise caused by his overworking brain, it would do the same for Pemberton.

But something went wrong. Sheldon watched in horror as a discharge of electricity shot up from Pemberton's hand and Amy screamed, stepping away as she grabbed her burnt shoulder.

"Amy!" Sheldon yelled as he took a step forward, but she put out her hand to him, palm facing him.

"Stay back!" she instructed him.

The pause was long enough for Pemberton to rush at Amy; for second Sheldon feared he was stronger, too, although he continued to look like a doughy halfling. What if it hadn't been Amy's blood that gave Sheldon his new physique? After all, Pemberton hadn't questioned it when Sheldon said his new strength was due to the serum.

Pemberton attempted to tackle her, but Amy grabbed his wrists and held him at bay. "It seems you have over-calculated your own strength, Dr. Pemberton, even with your fancy new brain."

"But I have not exaggerated my resolve. Your wimpy husband may not be willing to kill you, but I am!"

"Hey!" Sheldon started to protest from the sidelines, but he stopped when he realized he was, in fact, standing on the sidelines.

Amy pushed Pemberton away and reached for her lasso again. Suddenly every paper in the room, all those cluttered on the desk and the tabletops, rose and started to spin around the room, as though it were a giant snow globe. Sheldon put his hands up, pushing away the papers as they struck him on end, each tiny collision holding the force of a paper cut. There was so much paper - receipts, torn scraps, notebooks sheets, copy paper - that he clamped his eyes and covered his head with his arms, blotting out everything but dozens of minuscule injuries. Maybe he was wimp, after all, that coward and weak-willed man Amy claimed he wasn't if he couldn't even withstand paper cuts.

Until he heard Amy scream. Sheldon's eyes snapped open and he grabbed the papers, crumbling them and throwing them to the floor until he had a clear view of the lab.

No. No. No.

Wonder Amy cowered against the back wall, her hands crossed in front of her, trying but failing to fight off the long streams of electrokinesis that flowed from Pemberton's fingertips. Her bracelets glowed and smoked from the voltage. He had her cornered, she could not move, and yet he continued to shock her, over and over again. He was torturing her and enjoying it, laughing as the deadly electrical shocks flowed through and from him, just like Emperor Palpatine.

It was the exact same pose Sheldon had seen the day in the kitchen, the day he passed out. Everything from that period felt like a feverish dream and the details were normally hazy, but this came back with clarity. This was the outcome he'd foreseen: Amy cowering in fear, genuine fear, helpless against a stronger opponent. Her power and speed were useless if she was crippled by thousands of volts of electricity shooting through her body.

Sheldon, too, was crippled as he watched. He was just as helpless; he was only human and this was a battle between two metahumans. His legs frozen, Sheldon stared in horror as Amy screamed, trapped and almost defeated.

Just as he'd seen before. He'd never seen any other outcome. Was that because there was no other outcome possible, that Amy's demise was a forgone conclusion? Or was that because his orbitofrontal cortex could not withstand the thought of causing Amy so much pain?

He loved her. Not just from the first night together or even that first kiss in the park. He'd loved her before, the other her, the hidden her, the alter ego he saw in the cafeteria line covering herself in cardigans and tights. The shy, apprehensive, evasive her. That had been two possible outcomes, too, hadn't it, even though, at the time, he'd only seen one? There also was the version of her that would never emerge from her superhero shadow, the version of her crippled with fear in a completely different way.

And yet, then, he _had _changed the outcome and found the other version. Even without his brain functioning at impossible capacities. Even without quantum fissures and telekinesis. He'd changed the course of her life - their lives - with his heart, with the power of his love. And, then at the end, with the power of science. But only science used for love. He didn't need Pemberton's serum or telekinesis to change future. There was nothing he couldn't do without with the heart and the brain he already had - those puny, merely human organs.

"Shel - don - run!" Amy screamed, a sound of terror and anguish, each syllable an arduous task. "Save - your - self!"

"No," he whispered. No. He refused to believe this was the only possible conclusion. For the only conclusion had always been love.

"Run!" she roared once more, and the ground shook beneath them with the effort of her plea.

Sheldon turned and ran.

He skidded on something as he raced out of the lab, tripping. Struggling to get up, he picked up the cause of his stumble without thought and ran into the hallway, Amy's screams filling the air around him.

Outside of the lab, he ran his hands through his hair, making it stick up and emphasizing the still-uneven nature of its regrowth. He knew what he needed to do, but he had no idea how to accomplish it. "Think, think!" he admonished himself. He had to use the brain and the love he already had, the brain and the love that even Pemberton couldn't take from him.

The object he'd picked up cut into his palm, and Sheldon looked down to see Pemberton's keycard. It must have come flying off at some point when Amy tackled him. The keycard gave him access to all of Stark's labs. And then Sheldon knew exactly what to do.

He ran to the new electromagnetics lab and swiped the card. The light changed from red to green and Sheldon charged in. It was still a worksite, and Sheldon's head swiveled as he walked briskly through, dodging tools and supplies, searching for what he needed. Time was of the essence. Then he saw them, fewer than before as some had been installed along the walls, but there were still sheets of solid iron on a cart in the corner. He ran over, touched one, but then paused. They were so heavy. He hadn't even been able to pick one up when he'd visited before. But Amy had given him what he'd needed, didn't she? They were in this together, teammates and partners, no matter what. He may not have her superpowers, but he had the strength of a man who might have spent a summer working out.

Sheldon's enlarged muscles flexed as he lifted a sheet of iron. Allowing himself a small smile, he looked around for one more thing. The tanks of sulfur hexafluoride were in the opposite corner, and he ran toward them. They, too, were incredibly heavy, but he shifted the sheet of iron to beneath one arm and he hugged the tank under the other armpit. Even with his new strength, he almost sank to his knees in surprise at the weight.

But he took a deep breath, tightened his grip, and trotted back to Pemberton's lab. Amy's screams still reverberated through the building and they grew louder as he approached, each one urging him to go faster. But at least if she were screaming she was still alive.

However, when he entered the lab, he saw her flagging, no longer tall and fighting, but instead huddled on her knees on the floor. Her hands, once held out to try and push away the lightning bolts, now wrapped around her face to shield it. Her arms were burned and the putrid smell of hot flesh filled the air.

Pemberton didn't even glance toward him when Sheldon returned. Maybe he thought that a mere human was too insignificant to be concerned about; maybe he was so maniacal that he only wanted the pleasure that inflicting this pain brought to him. He had no resisting orbitofrontal cortex to stop him, no love in his life greater than any evil that might come his way. He was worthless and empty, ready to be filled with hate and delusion. Even before he discovered whatever the serum was, he was the type of man who had probably already committed a hundred smaller crimes. Nothing overt that would involve risking himself, but rather shirking, hidden crimes to make himself appear better than he really was, infractions to try to hide his deficiencies. He was the type of man who would probably plagiarize his dissertation.

Sheldon lowered his new supplies and crouched down to align the sheet of iron on the floor before he pushed it, running the calculations for velocity and trajectory through his mind. It slid across the vinyl floor just as he planned, between table legs and over scattered papers, until it stopped between Pemberton and Amy.

Immediately, the bolts of electricity stopped striking Amy and were diverted toward the iron, cracking and spitting out as they hit its insulating properties. Amy dropped fully to the floor, silent.

Pemberton finally turned and noticed him. "I will kill you next!" he bellowed.

"No, you won't!" Sheldon yelled back. "I have science and I have my orbitofrontal cortex lit up brighter than Cherenkov Radiation, and that is all I need!"

However, pure iron was also a heat conductor and the sheet started to glow red. Sheldon reached up to wipe the sweat off his brow and he opened the tank of sulfur hexafluoride and rolled it toward Pemberton. The gas came out quickly, hissing and blowing into the hot air. Sheldon coughed but the electrical bolts sizzled and died in the gas.

Sheldon watched as Pemberton tried repeatedly to force new current from his hands, but, because of the gas, only a few sparks came sputtering out. Even those only traveled toward the sheet of iron on the floor. As Sheldon grabbed the lasso from Amy's prone waist, Pemberton tried to kick the tank of gas away, but it was too heavy and he only yelled and danced around on one foot.

Amy did not awaken, so Sheldon lifted the lasso above his head just as he'd seen her do, letting its strength frizzle down his arm. It was not painful when there was only truth in his heart. Then he paused, uncertainty creeping into his chest.

As a child, his kindergarten class had gone to cowboy day camp as a field trip. There, they had been forced to attempt to lasso a bucket. Sheldon had failed and all the other children had laughed. At the time, he was unconcerned as one cannot earn their doctorate in cowboy arts. But what if this was just another way he would disappoint Amy with him human weakness?

"Amy," he said, nudging her with his foot. She did not stir.

"Maybe - maybe you were - too late," Pemberton coughed, extending his arm to try to send out electricity again.

"No!" Sheldon screamed and he raised the lasso high above his head. He imagined Amy's strong blood coursing through his veins, and he rotated his elbow and let the golden loop fly with all the anger he felt. When it surrounded Pemberton and the man screamed - like a young child, Sheldon thought - he tugged it so tight the evil scientist could not move.

Gas almost completely filled the room now, and Sheldon bent double with a cough. It was getting harder to breathe and his head was starting to feel fuzzy. He needed to hurry. Sulfur hexafluoride itself was non-toxic, but it was heavier than oxygen and inhaling too much could lead to asphyxiation. Pemberton was coughing constantly, too, and his breath was labored. Sheldon pulled him to the closest table and tied him to the leg. For a second, a dark second, he considered setting the tank right in front of his foe. But Wonder Amy would not do that. And neither would Sheldon. He reached over and turned off the gas.

Pemberton slumped within his bonds, but Sheldon confirmed he was still breathing and had just passed out. It was possible he could regain his strength as the gas cleared, but it was a calculated risk Sheldon would have to take to be the better person.

Next, Sheldon ran to Amy's side and lifted her, shaking her gently as he carried her out of the lab and down the hallway. When they reached the soaring reception area, he carried her up the glass staircase there, so that they would be above any gas that might seep out that far, although it was unlikely.

"Amy! Amy! Wake up!" Sheldon shook her harder when they reached the top, tapping her on the cheek.

She coughed and Sheldon helped her sit up, careful to avoid her burned arms. "Amy! We did it!"

"Your - your voice sounds funny," she barked again, her voice especially deep and gravelly, as though she'd been smoking several packs of cigarettes a day for years.

He coughed, too, but his head was starting to feel clearer. "It's the molecular mass," he explained when he'd managed to clear his throat. "It changes the resonance frequencies of the vocal tract, like helium but opposite. Thus the deep timbre. It should pass quickly."

"What a pity. I like phone sex Sheldon," she said, managing a wink before another wave of coughs ran through her. He was so happy that she was both alive and as cheeky as ever that he didn't even bother to ask what phone sex was.

* * *

Later, as they sat in the back of a Stark ambulance, taking turns sharing an oxygen mask, they watched Dr. Pemberton being led away in electromagnetic-dampening handcuffs.

"You did it, Sheldon," Amy said, her voice already back to normal.

"No, _we_ did it," he corrected. "I wouldn't have been able to lift that iron or the gas tank if I didn't have your blood's effect on my muscles to help."

"But I didn't know sulfur hexafluoride was such an excellent electrical insulator. You know that all on your own; I only knew it was used for retinal detachment repairs."

"And I didn't know that," Sheldon admitted.

"We make a really good team," Amy mused.

"Indeed. I'll stop the electro-megalomanic and you'll stop my macula from falling off."

They laughed together, but it was more a giggle that seemed hard to stop once it started. Amy reached over to turn off the oxygen flow. "I think we've had enough of that. Giddiness can be the first sign of hyperoxia."

"How are your arms?" Sheldon asked, pointing toward the bandages.

"They hurt. But they'll heal in a few hours." Although Amy's super blood had helped Sheldon heal faster, his human blood had still diluted its power. But, for Amy herself, healing remained a matter of mere hours.

In unison, they took a deep breath of the clear night air. The first faint glows of an orange sunrise tickled the horizon in the east.

"Amy -"

"Sheldon -"

"You first," Amy prompted.

"I just want to make sure you know everything I said to Dr. Pemberton before you came in was a lie. I know it was our plan, but it must have been difficult to overhear."

"Yes, it was difficult, especially as it wasn't all a lie."

"What?" He snapped his head toward her.

She looked back at him with a soft, sad smile. "Sheldon, I know everything that has happened has been a blow to your self-esteem. There's no way it couldn't be. I'm sure getting caught in a simple lab explosion would be embarrassing. But the important thing is that you realize what's true and how to correct it moving forward. That's what makes you a better man than Dr. Pemberton."

"So you think that's why he believed me? Even if you're correct - and I'm not saying you are - not everything I said was true. You know that, right? I have no desire to seek revenge on you for what you did. I know you why you did it, that such drastic actions were necessary to save my life. And my actions were just as bad; my intentions certainly were." The last part was whispered, with a gulp.

"I know." She bumped against him with her shoulder. For once, the gesture didn't make him fall sideways. "I think he believed you because I've noticed that I'm the only thing you can lie successfully about. It's why I suggested you lie in the first place."

"Oh. Maybe." He hadn't considered it before. "Yes, I think you're right." He paused. "There's one thing I don't understand, though. And you know how I hate that."

"What?"

"My lies worked, but why? When I - when I was ill, I could see various outcomes for different actions. But Pemberton didn't seem to know. He didn't expect you to show up, he didn't seem concerned when I came back into his lab with the iron and the gas. He said he'd given himself the same serum; he had the same telekinesis and electrokinesis I did. So shouldn't he have seen all that as possible outcomes ahead of time, too?"

That wrinkle he knew well appeared between Amy's eyebrows as she thought. Finally, she said, "Ultimately, I suppose it doesn't matter as long as it worked. But . . . maybe the serum or toxin or whatever it was effects various persons slightly differently. After all, he wasn't surprised when you said you had super strength, even though he didn't."

"True. But, if I'm being honest, that stool was pretty flimsy."

Amy smiled. "I think Pemberton is a very selfish man. And you're not. Look at the sacrifices you make for me on a daily basis, Sheldon. Even in the depths of your illness, you were able to think about how one action would affect another and how that would affect the people around you. Also, you are not alone in the world. Maybe it was an effect of your orbitofrontal cortex fighting back, but when you imagined taking over the world, you imagined doing it with my cooperation. With our children."

"Amy -"

She put her hand up to stop him. "You were thinking about me because you are not alone. But Pemberton, he is alone. Because he only cares about himself. He believed he was unstoppable all by himself. He never thought about anyone else, he only believed in his own power, even if it was fraudulent. Maybe that's why."

"Hmmm." Sheldon considered her words. It was all a theory, of course; it was unlikely they'd ever know all the answers. And he didn't know how to feel about it. More guilt that he'd become a monster who wanted to create a super race with Amy? Or some sort of strange relief that, even in his darkest imaginings, she was there with him? Suddenly he had idea. "Are you going to study him? His serum or his brain?"

"No." Both the tone of her voice and the shake of her head were fierce.

"No?" Sheldon's eyebrows went up. "Don't you want to know exactly what it was? Exactly how it worked?"

"I never want to see him again, thank you. I've had enough of the problems he's caused. He's already taken too much from me, and I refuse to give him anymore of my time or concern."

When she said it that way, it made sense. As much as they both lived for researching and understanding the unknown, it was far important that they live for each other. And, of course, she was correct that she'd already seen the effects up close and far too personal to want to experience again. Neither did Sheldon, so he nodded and wished he could squeeze her hand to tell her he understood as they watched some of the emergency vehicles start to leave and the various clumps of Stark employees started to break up.

"Or -" Amy suddenly said "- everything you think you saw could have just been _Star Trek_-influenced delusions of pseudoscience. Quantum fissures!" she said with a playful snort.

Sheldon opened his mouth to retort, but Amy pointed toward a large man, clearly one of the police officers here, walking toward the ambulance.

"Well, it looks like duty calls," she said, jumping off the back of the ambulance. "Time to give my report."

"What are you going to tell them? About why I was here? I mean, one of our ongoing lies is that no one knows that Wonder Amy is married. They think we're just . . ." He didn't finish the sentence.

Amy shrugged. "I'll tell them the same lies you told Pemberton. That you two came to work on something together, but then he threatened you and I came to save you." She took a step forward, paused, and turned back around. "Is that what you want me to tell them?"

Whatever she came up with would work; it always did. But did he want Amy to once again take the credit for rescuing nothing more than her accident-prone, helpless human boy toy? A distasteful flirtation with a married man? He swallowed. "Whatever you think is best."

As she walked away, Sheldon saw her biting her lip in thought. But when the policeman advanced, Amy brightened and told her tale of victory.

_To be continued . . ._

* * *

_ **Thank you in advance for your reviews!** _


	13. Chapter 13

"No." Sheldon erased the line of numbers and symbols from his whiteboard. "Maybe this," he mumbled as he wrote something else. Then he stepped back, pressed the top of the marker to his bottom lip and considered what he'd written. "Nope. That's rubbish, too."

As he reached up to erase his revised line of work, a blob of mashed banana landed in the middle of it. "Hector!" He looked down at the baby - no, a toddler now - resting on his hip, the one that had been content to be held and eat his half-banana for several minutes now. "I didn't mean that you should make it literal rubbish."

He kissed the top of his son's head and put him in his play yard before he got a paper towel and cleaned the whiteboard. "Although, at least your banana was edible, and that's more useful than what I've got here. Maybe I should just move to Central America and become a banana farmer."

"Have you seen the size of the insects there? You wouldn't last a week," Amy's voice came from the hallway.

"See, even you're more correct about things today than I am," he said with a sigh and then turned around to look at her. "Wowza!"

Amy stood there with her hands on her hips and a soft smile on her bold red lips. She wore a long, lean red gown, something shiny with a deep V-neck and a slit - a very high slit, Sheldon noticed with a gulp - up one of her legs. The opening exposed a golden high-heeled gladiator-style sandal that laced past her knee, ending in a tassel on her thigh. Attached to her shoulders, she wore a soft cape that cascaded down her back, the outside of it the same red fabric as the dress but the inside a field of white stars on royal blue.

"Do you like it? I had it made while we were in Themyscira." She twirled for him, and he noticed the inside of the dress was also lined with the same starry fabric. "Do you think it's too over the top for a wedding reception? I know they already had a non-superhero ceremony, but I still don't want to steal attention from the bride."

Sheldon gulped again, regaining his speech. "You're Wonder Amy; it's almost impossible for you _not_ to steal attention. And it's a superhero wedding, so a cape seems on brand."

She grinned widely and said, "Only a dress cape. I find it impossible and unnecessary to fight crime in one." Amy stepped over to his whiteboard. "What are you solving? Other than banana farming."

"Solving is not the correct word. I'm attempting - with very poor results - to work on super asymmetry again."

"Super asymmetry?" Amy's eyes sharpened. "But that's what you were - I mean, you made me take all your notebooks and burn them in the biohazard incinerator. You said they were useless."

"I said they were deranged and inflated ramblings, and I was correct. But I thought of super asymmetry years ago, before I ever became . . . ill. Anyway, I gave it up as impossible. And then I met you."

"Me? I love credit but what do I have to do with it?"

"Technically, just the existence of superheroes in general. There is Asgard and all sorts of new realms. Dr. Strange can bend time and matter. I think super asymmetry might have something to do with that. It's not magic; it's science. It has to be." But he sighed deeply. "Not that I'm getting anywhere. I'll still be standing here, no closer to a solution, when you get home. Speaking of, are you leaving now?"

"After I put on my tiara. And after you get dressed for the party and take Hector upstairs for Leonard and Penny to babysit him."

"What?" Sheldon blinked. "As I just said, it's a superhero wedding. Wonder Amy travels this world alone, crime and weddings alike. I stay home and watch my child and do physics."

"Not anymore." Amy put her hand on his arm. "I've been thinking about something Dr. Pemberton said."

"Why? First, he was a failure and then he was a madman who failed. I thought we thought we weren't going to give him another thought. What use do we have for him?"

"I know. Listen, Sheldon, I'm not ready to tell the entire world - or even our friends - about who I really am yet. Maybe in time; I don't know. I still think it's best if everyone in our social circle and at Caltech just thinks you're married to Dr. Fowler, dowdy neurobiologist."

"Of course, that's what we agreed on, ages ago. But you are far from dowdy."

"Well, certainly not in this dress." The smirk faded as she took a deep breath. "But I think it's time for the other superheroes and some of the support staff to know - people who we can trust. I want you to come to this wedding with me. As Wonder Amy's husband. It will be our way of telling them I'm Dr. Fowler."

"But it's not safe. You have to protect your alter ego at all costs; you told me that."

"Not at all costs. If you feel unworthy or shamed by hiding our relationship, then that's too great of a cost."

"No, it's not. Yes, it's troubling that others think I don't have enough integrity to avoid flirting with women who aren't my wife. But it's worth it if it keeps me and Hector safe. And you. This apartment is your safe space, too."

"I know. But I think that Dr. Pemberton taught us that it's a fallacy, an overconfidence, to believe that we can ever be completely safe, even here. If we're going to be together somewhere, we should fight together. We're better as a team. We should both be able to claim a victory when it is shared."

"I don't know . . ." Sheldon would be lying if he said that he hadn't been rankled to be relegated to a helpless bystander the couple of times he and Amy had fought together. But he was also equally relieved when she left him to give her reports.

"Plus, what do we say if Pemberton starts telling everyone Wonder Amy and Dr. Fowler are the same person? Wouldn't it be best for all the superheroes to already know? To take that power away from him, to help us hide the truth?"

Sheldon gulped. Was Amy correct? Did Dr. Pemberton, even locked away in his electromagnetic-dampening cell, still have the power to harm her, to harm their happiness, in some way? "Well, there's that . . ." his voice trailed.

"And Dr. Hernandez reminded me of something that _you_ taught me," Amy continued, her voice soft but still sure. "That I can trust people, that there are kind and good people out there, who are willing to keep my secret. I cannot sacrifice a life, a life of love and happiness, to fear. And neither can you."

As she reached up and cupped his face in her palm, Amy continued, "Mostly, though, I don't want anyone to think you are just a disposable boy toy. It's demeaning to both of us - and Dr. Fowler. I don't think we can tell everyone yet, but it's a start. This is not a flirtation or an infatuation. I want everyone to know how permanent this love is. How strong and true it is. What this love will do to survive. It will travel to death and back again."

"Was it love at the bottom of the ocean? Is that what brought you back to me?" Sheldon whispered. He remembered how he dared not hope, even as he mourned all he could have had and lost that night.

"Was it love in that MRI lab that brought you back to me?"

"Yes." He pulled her in close, wrapping his arms tightly around her. She was right; theirs was a love that survived the deepest and blackest of abysses.

"Is that a yes to love or a yes to the wedding?" Amy asked.

"Yes. Yes to both."

"Good." She patted his arm and pulled away. "Go put on your tux while I get my tiara."

"A tuxedo?" Sheldon whined. "It's that formal?"

"Just think about how good those pants make your posterior look. And hurry; you still have to take Hector upstairs. I'll start the preflight for the jet."

"The jet?" Sheldon groaned. Even with the rug Amy put at his feet, soaring high above the clouds like that terrified him.

"How else do you think we're getting to New York for the weekend?"

"Okay, but I'm not doing the chicken dance," Sheldon said as he started to walk toward the bedroom.

"So you're going to pass on the chance to flap your arms like wings and cluck with_ both_ Captain America and Batman?"

* * *

Both the chicken dance and _Love Shack_ had long come and gone, and Sheldon stood at the edge of the dance floor, waiting for Amy to return from the restroom. The wedding reception was a festive affair in the atrium of Stark Enterprises east coast headquarters, the space transformed with balloons and streamers and a disco ball high in the ceiling.

The break and the cold punch he was drinking were well-deserved for an evening of dancing with his beautiful wife. Not just a single timid, overly polite dance of an occasional colleague and not the rumor-fueling dance of a lover. Amy was correct; everyone here was only thrilled for them. Sheldon rotated his shoulder, glad that he still had the muscles Amy's blood had given him to withstand all the thumps of congratulations he'd received on the joint.

Amy's smile glowed brighter than the jewel in her golden tiara, flashing more than ever in her new red dress as she introduced him, over and over again, even to those he'd already met. Her radiance continued on the dance floor. Where had Amy learned all those moves? The cha-cha, the rumba, the waltz - Amy knew the steps for every type of music played. Marriage looked especially good on her this evening. And, he suspected, it looked especially good on him. It was a delight and a relief to be out in public with such a capable woman at his side, to allow everyone to see how in love they were.

"Come on, the tango is next." Amy's arm hooked into his elbow and she took his almost-empty punch glass from him.

"How do you know?" Sheldon asked, even as he accompanied her out on the floor, dodging couples as they shifted between songs.

"There's a playlist on one of the music stands. I peeked."

As though she'd planned it, the long sound of a deep violin note stretched through the air, then plucked at the very end. Sheldon put his elbows out wide, in the exaggerated stance of the style, and Amy arranged herself in them. Just as he was about to take the first lunge-like step, she exclaimed, "Oh! I almost forgot!"

"Forgot what?"

"These." To Sheldon's alarm, she reached into the bosom of her dress and pulled out a small gathering of royal blue fabric, sprinkled with white stars. The edges of her lips turned up as she tucked the material into the chest pocket of his tuxedo jacket as though it were a pocket square.

Sheldon gulped. "What is that?" he asked, even though parts of him - a singular part of him - seemed to already know.

"They're my panties," Amy whispered with a wink.

The music escalated and Amy pulled at him, leaning deeply back so that he was draped over her. He was supposed to be dipping her, keeping her from tumbling, but it was Amy who was in control of the situation.

"If we do that one more time, you'll be showing everything to everyone at this wedding!" he hissed into her ear as she yanked herself toward him. He tried to ignore the extra rocking motion she'd added to her pelvis with the move. Her high-heeled sandals put her at just the right height for what she was trying to accomplish. "And don't you dare twirl!"

Amy leaned in close, nuzzling his neck. "You know when I said I didn't want you to be my boy toy anymore?"

"Yes." Sheldon tried to take small steps in hopes of limiting the gaping of the long split up the front of her dress.

"I wouldn't mind if you were my boy toy sometimes. Like right now." He felt her teeth graze his pulse, causing a full-body shiver that had nothing to do with the beat of the music.

"Amy! We're at a wedding! In a public place! And you're half-naked!"

"That's the point."

Another step, another move, and Amy rotated in his arms, shimmying and shaking her body as she moved down his, her round bottom pressing against his undeniable hardness.

Sheldon pulled her back quickly, trying to cover himself. "Let me take you somewhere private," Amy cooed just before she grabbed his hand and tugged him off the dance floor. Sheldon followed, knowing that fighting her would only draw more attention to his current situation. Hopefully, Amy's stride wasn't so long that she was flashing everyone.

Breathless from the effort of keeping up with her, Sheldon let Amy open an unmarked door just past the restrooms and shove him inside. As she locked the door behind them, he flipped the light switch. "The photocopier room?" he said, raising an eyebrow.

"Happy accident," Amy said with a smile. "But appropriate."

Each kiss was hungry, a force unto itself between them. Amy pushed him against the tall shelves stacked with reams of various papers, fumbling with his belt as she did so. Sheldon buried his hands in her hair, his fingertips tangling in the curls as his tongue searched for hers, over and over again. She put her knee up on his thigh, and he reached down to tickle her behind it, just between two of the golden straps keeping her sandals on.

As they swiveled and swayed across the room in a completely different kind of tango, Amy pushed his jacket off his shoulders. Sheldon pressed her up against the largest photocopier there. "Amy," he moaned into her chest, running his tongue over the red satin to feel her nipple rising beneath the fabric. She must have removed her bra, too.

His pants and underwear fell to his ankles in one swoop, and Amy reached down to guide him into her and he pushed into her waiting body.

"Faster!" she ordered as Sheldon grasped her bottom to hold her still as her legs encircled him. He plunged deeper into her, each thrust causing her to rock against the machine behind her.

It took almost nothing, her body was so swollen and ready for him, and she cried out, that roar of triumph he knew well. Even as she still rocked with her orgasm, Sheldon knelt in front of her, appreciating how the long slit in her dress combined with the spread of her legs caused it to fall away from her core like curtains. He pushed it aside and buried his head deep within the stars he saw there.

She tasted like everything he remembered and never wanted to forget: power and intelligence and beauty and trust and confidence. He lifted one leg over his shoulder as he heard Amy groan, "Great Hera!"

His fingers slipped easily into her and he timed them with his tongue, one pressing as the other pulled, each motion an opposite but perfectly complementary partner. Amy's pelvis rocked with the rhythm he set, rising and falling against his mouth until she tightened and convulsed around him, another guttural cry from her mouth filling the room.

Only when she sagged above him did he stop and rise, kissing her mouth softly. Then as he wrapped his arm around her waist, holding her close, he reached behind her and pressed some buttons at random.

"What are you doing?" Amy asked.

"Starting this machine. You're very loud."

"You wouldn't have it any other way."

As the machine started, the first _thummmmm-whack! _sounding, he twisted her around and pulled her dress up over her waist. Her tall golden sandals winked at him; the angle was such that he couldn't see the top as they disappeared behind the amble curves of her bottom. This time, he entered her slowly, slow enough for her to whimper, a small beg for more. He took his time filling her, letting her surround and engulf him. Then he did it again, even slower, letting her almost cry with the desire to possess him.

"Please, Sheldon," she begged, and she turned to look at him over her shoulder. Her greens eyes flashed and twinkled behind her glasses, and her golden tiara caught the reflection of the overhead light. She didn't look away, and, slowly, a mischievous smile spread over her lips. This was his favorite way to see her, and she knew it. Then, just as he filled her again, she closed her eyes in pleasure, a slow, deep descent of her dark eyelashes.

Amy didn't turn back around and he locked eyes with her. Sheldon let the photocopier set the rhythm, both filling her and emptying her with every sharp _whack!_, moving in and out of her with the _thummmmm_. This was the only type of overwhelming synesthesia he wanted, the only way he wanted every one of his senses and every part of his brain alive and crackling. There was the sound of the machine, the crescendo of every motion it made echoed in the mew of pleasure from Amy. There was the smell of hot paper and Amy's indescribable scent, never stronger than when she was so aroused. There was the taste of her, still lingering on his lips and his tongue. There was the feel of her, so many feelings: her hot, slick inner-self, the firm roundness of her hips as he held them, and then, the swollen bud of her that he found with his fingertip. Amy changed her angle to give him more room to touch her and she gripped the edge of the photocopier so hard he saw her knuckles whiten and the plastic beneath dent. Through it all, though, she never once took her velvety green eyes off of him, looking over her shoulder in that way she had, even as he heard her mews gave way to long, strong moans of her approaching orgasm. Still, he didn't increase the pace, and only when he felt the first flutter around himself did he drive faster into her, both of them crying out as long waves of release and satisfaction washed over them in unison.

Still within her, Sheldon collapsed against her back, reaching over to turn off the photocopier. The silence that filled the room was almost as deafening as all that had come before, their panting breath mere shadows. He brushed Amy's hair away from her neck and kissed her gently there.

"Where did you did you get that stamina?" Amy managed to pant out.

"I think you gave it to me, along with my new muscles." But he, too, was spent and thirsty for more punch.

"Then I should have committed unsanctioned medical procedures on you years ago." She chuckled and Sheldon kissed her again even as he whispered, "Don't get any ideas."

As they redressed and made themselves presentable again, Amy said, "Huh. I wonder if this would work for your super asymmetry problem."

"What?" Sheldon looked up from his bow tie he was straightening. Amy was bent over at the waist, working on the long strings on her sandals that had twisted in their joyous fray.

"Look at this. The knots are only slightly misaligned at the bottom, but, owing to the curvature of my leg, by the top -"

"There are asymmetric knots is all dimensions!" Sheldon said, his mouth gaping slightly at the sight of Amy's retying her twisted sandal over her knee.

"Exactly. From the very beginning, at the initial moment of creation, the fundamental forces - the very first knots - have to lack symmetry before they can affect the whole."

"The amount of asymmetry grows as the knots . . . well, bootstrap themselves up." Sheldon took a deep breath. "You did it!"

Amy tied the last knot on her thigh and stood up, letting the long red dress cover her legs again. "No, we did it."

"Wonder Amy Farrah Fowler, will you author a paper on super asymmetry with me?"

She put her hand on the doorknob and the door cracked open. "Only if you agree to dance this next song with me."

"Deal." Sheldon started to follow her but then yelled, "Wait!" When she turned to look over her shoulder at him, a hand resting on her hip, he asked, whispering, "Did you put your underpants back on?"

It was her wink that answered.

**THE END**

* * *

_ **If writing itself is a solitary activity, the plotting of a novel is not. In this particular case, two people were instrumental in bringing this story to life.** _

_ **First, my wonderful husband, who has never been less than supportive of my writing, gave me the seed of this story. Two years ago, when I was in the middle of ** _ **The Wonder Amy Paradox** _ **, he said, "You know, at some point Wonder Amy will have to fight Sheldon. It's the most common trope in comic books, that the hero has to battle what he or she loves the most." He's correct; more than one Marvel movie centers on this plot point. I filed his idea away in the back of my brain, only occasionally returning to it and thinking through how it could transpire.** _

_ **Then this spring, I said to my dearest friend and Beta, Melissa, that I had the idea for a Wonder Amy story in which Sheldon begins to turn into a super villain after being bitten or infected by something and Wonder Amy has to battle him, along with several other details I had settled upon. However, I knew it wasn't enough. It was too linear, too expected, it needed more beats. It was the fabulous Melissa who suggested an "evil scientist" and it was she who mentioned Dr. Pemberton. It was this wonderful idea that allowed me to add, not just more set pieces, but also further depth to my tale. And that, of course, was on top of her usual and priceless proof-reading, idea-bouncing, and hand-holding.** _

_ **And there is no way my writing would ever continue without the kind words and reviews from you, my dear readers. Thank you!** _


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